OPINION:
Is The Wall Street Journal turning into ProPublica?
The Wall Street Journal has always been known as a right-leaning editorial page but a down-the-middle news section that proved its mettle by infuriating people on both sides.
ProPublica is a left-wing news outlet that reports on topics they’re directed to by its liberal funders. In early July, The Wall Street Journal seemed to cross the road into ProPublica territory.
It claimed in a story that major telecom companies have left a sprawling maze of lead-covered cables across the country that are beginning to leach into the groundwater supply. It left the impression this was the next big threat to children.
What it doesn’t tell you — until it is forced to much later — is that this story resulted from an 18-month investigation that was not so much a Wall Street Journal reporting project as a collaboration with environmental activist groups that the paper didn’t disclose to its readers.
Two problems jump out.
First, this “investigation” into lead cables was performed not by disinterested, objective experts, but by activists who have been directly involved in bringing litigation against AT&T on this exact issue of lead cables. Accepting the “reporting” of a litigant in a lawsuit without at least seeking the same from the other side of the suit is not a good look from a journalistic perspective.
Being cagey about the source of this “information” makes it even worse, and that’s what The Wall Street Journal has done.
The first article in the Journal’s series reads in part: “Researchers Seth Jones and Monique Rydel Fortner, from the environmental consulting firm Marine Taxonomic Services (MTS), collected lead, soil and water samples at the Journal’s request.” Later in the article, the Journal asserted that “MTS isn’t a party to the AT&T lawsuit.”
It’s true that Marine Taxonomic Services is not a party to the lawsuit. But its owners, Mr. Jones and Ms. Rydel Fortner, are co-founders of an environmental activist group called Below the Blue, which has been directly involved in litigation against AT&T over lead cables in the Lake Tahoe area.
An article in South Tahoe Now states that Mr. Jones “connected with the non-profit California Sportsfishing Alliance, who brought suit under federal law and California’s Proposition 65 to get the cable removed.”
But it goes beyond using “research” from these groups involved in litigation against one of the accused companies. Marine Taxonomic Services, the firm run by the activist leaders of Below the Blue, took money for this “research” from the Environmental Defense Fund, a radical leftist group.
There’s no denying the connection. The Environmental Defense Fund published a 73-page report on the “research” and stated that it “worked alongside” Wall Street Journal reporters to prepare the series.
Nothing wrong with all that. What’s wrong is the Journal presenting the findings of this “research” as credible and evenhanded and then being cagey, if not downright misleading, on how it arrived at the newspaper’s doorstep.
The Wall Street Journal did not report on the EDF report, which was publicly shared on their website only after their series was published. More than a week after the publication of its first story in the series, a follow-up article partially acknowledged EDF’s funding role in the last line of the story’s last paragraph, stating that “MTS has received guidance and funding from EDF.”
On July 26, The Wall Street Journal was finally forced to make a correction to its initial story to disclose EDF’s role in funding its research. The correction states: “An earlier version of this article didn’t include information about the financial contribution the Environmental Defense Fund made to Marine Taxonomic Services.”
Despite its incremental follow-up disclosures on EDF’s funding role, the Journal has yet to clarify its statement that MTS is not a party to the AT&T litigation, a spurious claim belied by publicly available facts. The Journal also omitted from its reporting that it specifically designed the sampling to generate data showing high lead levels.
The EDF/Below the Blue report acknowledges that “sampling locations were chosen in part by their likelihood to show high lead levels.”
To be clear, lead exposure is a serious issue, and where it is present and where it’s clear who is responsible, companies should address the problem. But how big is the problem and how urgently it be addressed are questions that deserve fair, objective answers — not breathless series concocted by environmental activists and pawned off as straight journalism.
By contaminating its own investigation into lead, The Wall Street Journal undermines the importance of the issue itself.
It should come forward now, correct and update the record, and be more transparent about the origins of this series.
• Brian McNicoll, a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Virginia, is a former senior writer for The Heritage Foundation and former director of communications for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
