"NEGLIGENT": Top Newspaper Editorial Editors Slam WSJ's Lack Of Rove Disclosure

[babylonsister]

"NEGLIGENT": Top Newspaper Editorial Editors Slam WSJ's Lack Of Rove Disclosure
JOE STRUPP


The Wall Street Journal's failure to disclose op-ed columnist Karl Rove's ties to political organizations raising hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat President Obama and other Democratic candidates is drawing harsh criticism from editorial page editors at America's top newspapers.

Even as he writes regular columns on the 2012 election for the Journal, Rove serves as what Vanity Fair calls "the defacto leader of the Republican Party." As the co-founder of the super PAC American Crossroads and its related organization Crossroads GPS, Rove is helping to assemble a massive war chest to run attack ads against Democrats this fall -- an obvious conflict of interest.

snip//

Howell Raines, a former editorial page editor and executive editor at The New York Times, says that description is woefully inadequate during the current election season. "His role at American Crossroads is, if anything, more relevant to this campaign than his Bush ties, given the importance of PAC commercials in this campaign," Raines told Media Matters in an email.

According to Raines, who served as the Times' editorial page editor in the mid-1990s, "full disclosure of a contributor's ties and interests is a threshold requirement," and the Journal's description fails to provide the reader with "information relevant to the issue at hand."

Rove often appears to use his Journal column to further his efforts to defeat Democratic candidates. In one recent column, Rove suggested that the Romney campaign would be better off running positive ads on their own candidate, writing that attacking Obama is "a job better left (mostly) to outside groups." Neither Rove nor the Journal disclosed Rove's own role in working to raise at least $240 million before Election Day to fund such ad buys.

Raines is not alone in his critique. More than a dozen current and former editorial page editors at major newspapers told Media Matters that they were uneasy with the Journal's practice. Many stated outright that the Journal should be disclosing Rove's ties and some said they would not publish such columns with or without such disclosure.

more...

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/08/22/negligent-top-newspaper-editorial-editors-slam/189472

[rfranklin]

1. Rove is a lying, corrupt scumbag....what else is new?

Oh yeah, and a war criminal too.

[Doctor_J]

2. Negligent??!?!

If you look in the sewer that is the WSJ, you'll find that it isn't a newspaper at all but a propaganda rag just like they had in Germany in the mid-30's

[Spazito]

3. Given the WSJ is a Murdoch paper....

there is NO ethics, facts or journalism to be expected, imo. I am glad other major newpaper editors, past and present, are pointing this out using the Rove column as an example.