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WSJ staff allege censorship – graphic of uneven gains since financial crisis removed

Columbia Journalism Review: “Alleging “censorship,” Wall Street Journal staffers circulated a letter yesterday decrying the suppression of a story detailing uneven gains in the decade since the financial crisis. “This week a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal attempted to take a graphic offline because the facts it contained were not politically palatable,” the letter read. “When that failed, it was ‘de-surfaced,’ or, in other terms, taken off the front page and links were removed to it from as many places as possible. After an early flurry of traffic, views plummeted. This is censorship and it is beneath the standards of the Wall Street Journal. It isn’t the first time, either.” ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisinger tweeted that he heard the senior editor referenced was Journal EIC Gerard Baker, a detail that several staffers later supported. Baker has faced criticism in the past for taking a soft approach to coverage of the Trump administration, and Politico’s Michael Calderone and Jason Schwartz report that his problem with the story and its accompanying graphics was that they were “too liberal.” [h/t/ Pete Weiss]

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