A committee to protect editorial integrity at the Wall Street Journal said on Tuesday it will be more active in the search of a new managing editor for the paper after being blindsided by the resignation of Marcus Brauchli, according to a Reuters report.
The committee, whose duties include the hiring and firing of top Journal editors, learned of Brauchli's departure after the fact, which it said "failed to meet the letter and the spirit" of their agreement with owner News Corp.
To some media watchers, the statement raised questions about the group's effectiveness in maintaining the Journal's editorial independence after parent Dow Jones & Co was bought last year by Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate.
"The whole structure is so transparently ridiculous that I don't think anybody believes it," said Edward Wasserman, a journalism ethics professor at Washington and Lee University and a media columnist at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post. "The committee is putting out a statement basically acknowledging their complete irrelevance to the process," he said.
The committee was set up at the insistence of the Bancroft family as a condition to selling their interest in Dow Jones to News Corp in a $5.6 billion deal. Some family members feared Murdoch would use the Journal to advance his own interests and the committee was designed to stop that from happening.
In the statement, the committee said it has not been made aware of any issues of editorial independence or integrity at the Journal by Brauchli or News Corp. Brauchli told committee members that he was "approached two weeks earlier and told that News Corp wanted to make a change in the managing editor," the committee said in the statement.
The committee admitted it had no authority to block a resignation like Brauchli's, but said "learning of the Brauchli matter after the fact failed to meet the letter and the spirit of the agreement." "The committee intends to exercise fully its role in the approval of a successor managing editor and to take the steps necessary to prevent a repeat of the process it has just been through," the statement also said.
Brauchli, who has accepted a job as a News Corp consultant, was not immediately available to confirm the statement.
