Newly hired Executive Editor of the Washington Post Marcus Brauchli -- becoming just the third Executive Editor there since 1968 -- made two statements that ought to give any one pause.
The first statement was this:
What was important..was the [Wall Street] Journal, not me -- that the editorial integrity be preserved, not that my job be preserved. . . . Fighting for my job would have been mostly selfish and undermined the fight to maintain quality journalism.
The statement makes little sense out of context, and perhaps even less sense in context.
As noted elsewhere in the Post's article about the hiring of former Wall Street Journal Editor Marcus Brauchli as the Post's new Executive Editor, replacing Leonard Downie Jr.; "Brauchli was caught between Murdoch's push for rapid change -- which included a newsier front page, shorter stories and more coverage of national politics -- and much of the staff, which wanted to preserve the Journal's traditional role as a business newspaper specializing in long narratives. Brauchli became a middleman, trying to accommodate the new owner's demands while, for example, protecting the quirky front-page features known as A-heds, which Murdoch had criticized."
So Brauchli is saying that trying to maintain the Journal's crisp and yet detailed national approach to business news which, a horrendous editorial page aside, had marked it as one of the world's leading newspapers, would have undermined quality journalism? The type of quality journalism that the new Regime under Rupert Murdoch was trying to bring? Quality journalism similar to the quality journalism on Murdoch owned Fox "news"?
Perhaps that analysis is a bit incomplete, and some of this story is missing, but still, Brauchli sounds like he is trying to sanctify and mollify a whole lot more than he is trying to reveal or not mislead, with this very strange "I did it for the paper, because where I disagreed I must have been wrong" sycophantic pronouncement.
But while the first statement is more of a possible curiosity which may simply not tell the entire story, it is Brauchli's second statement which is a bit harder to fathom.
There is being a good soldier, and there is lying one's ass off. And then again, there is simply missing the reality that is staring one in the face. So which of these, if any, does the following dubious quote attributed to Brauchli represent?
Brauchli, however, said there was no reason for him to protest. "I never saw any evidence that the owners had tried to impose ideological or commercial agendas on the news coverage," he said.
Rupert Murdoch? Really? It was just a simple disagreement over changing the format and emphasis of the paper, and one on which, as he puts it, preserving his job as Executive Editor was somehow undermining responsible journalism at the WSJ?
The Washington Post, on some of the more important media, and particularly, political issues of our day, has an increasingly bad journalistic habit of not telling it like it is. These quotes, from the new Executive Editor and former Editor at the conservative Wall Street Journal do not bode for a good start in a better direction.