Must-Read: So are we now to read the leak of the WSJ Trump interview transcript was some WSJ staffer undercutting editor-in-chief Gerry Baker's claim that his relationship with Trump is that of a "normal journalist", rather than that of an obsequious courtier and ideological ally?
It would seem so...
Joe Pompeo and Hadas Gold: Gerry Baker to staff: Criticism of Wall Street Journal's Trump coverage is 'fake news': "He said there's been 'a lot of nonsense appearing in the media about how unreliable our reporting is'... http://www.politico.com/media/story/2017/02/gerry-baker-defends-wsj-trump-coverage-004931
...mounted a vigorous defense of his newspaper's Donald Trump coverage, pushing back aggressively on months of internal criticism that the venerable broadsheet has been too soft on the real estate mogul and reality television star turned 45th president of the United States.... Baker said... employees who are unhappy with the Journal's objective, as opposed to oppositional, approach to Trump should work somewhere else.... "Try to cut out some of the noise, some of the panic," Baker advised the assembled reporters and editors, according to a person who was there.... Concerns about the Journal's Trump report have been simmering since at least the fall, when the paper garnered a reputation for access-driven campaign coverage that stood in contrast to aggressive investigations being pursued by competitors.... The tensions came to a head a couple of weeks ago after many staffers took issue with a late-night email from Baker cautioning them against using the phrase "majority Muslim" when describing countries impacted by Trump's immigration ban....
Numerous additional Journal insiders have come forward to weigh in on the matter, most of them off the record. Some reinforced what other sources have described as a perception of a rightward tilt in the Journal’s news pages since Baker became editor in chief, not only with how Trump stories are played, but also on coverage of things like climate change, the refugee crisis and other hot-button topics.... Three sources with intimate knowledge of the Journal’s inner workings said that Trump has been known to engage Baker by phone on occasion...
