Newswatch

By Thomas Griffith

"The campaign against Judge Bork is shrill, mean and anti-intellectual," a Wall Street Journal editorial commented typically. Critics of the Journal's editorial page often call it strident, narrow-minded and biased. Yet many of these critics hail the Journal's news pages for their tough coverage of the editorial page's most sacred cows and of corporate misdeeds.

The Journal has long been a newspaper with a split personality -- editorials written by "true believers" and the news reported by true skeptics. The man charged with reconciling these contrary forces doesn't believe in doing so. He is Warren H. Phillips, chairman and chief executive of the parent Dow Jones & Co., a low-keyed fellow who in his own eight years as managing editor of the Journal discovered that managing editors simply disregard the elephant of the editorial page. Yet as the boss, he encourages such somber trumpetings as a recent editorial branding the President's peace initiation as "Reagan's Bay , of Pigs." ("Barring some dramatic event, Nicaragua was lost once and for all to the Communist empire.")

The Journal's contentious editorials are a throwback to the era of opinionated press lords, but with one crucial difference. In the old days, hired editorial guns often mimicked or tried to give literary plausibility to the proprietor's every prejudice, cynically crafting synthetic bluster. Journal editorial writers have more autonomy to frame policy. But before hiring them, the Journal tests to make sure their views are genuinely conservative (liberals need not apply) and that they will not be (in Phillips' words) "preoccupied with trying to find the middle of the road." Provocative opinionating, Phillips believes, "makes a stronger contribution to public discourse."

While the Journal's editorial stance seems to the right of Reagan, Phillips rejects such a standard of measurement on the ground that the paper's conservatism predates the arrival of the Reagan crowd ("We're happy to have them in our camp, but we're not in theirs"). For the past 15 years, editorials have been the province of Robert L. Bartley, who is lean, incisive and full of certitude. His combativeness came out in a famously stormy dinner with the Journal's news staff in Washington in 1980, shortly before he won a Pulitzer Prize. But editorial writers' testy independence did not begin with Bartley: Phillips remembers Bartley's predecessor, Vermont Connecticut Royster, protesting, "I can't argue with ignorance," as he stormed out of his boss's office.

Occasionally this editorial dogmatism disturbs news editors. Journal editorials harped so much on "yellow rain," the alleged Soviet use of biological warfare in Cambodia, that Managing Editor Norman Pearlstine ordered news coverage that showed the evidence for it was suspect. Ordinarily, Pearlstine adds, "we're not a truth squad going after the editorial page." But just last month the Journal made its lead news story a tough inquiry into what ever happened to the supply-side economics that led to Reagan's 1981 tax cuts, ideas that the Journal's editorials had done more than anyone else to propagate. It found the movement in disarray, its leaders barely on speaking terms. The story said, "Many mainstream economists agree with Charles Schultze, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who says that 'a large part of the trillion dollars of national debt and hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign debt that has built up over the last few years is the $ supply-siders' legacy.' " Did such reporting disturb the editors? As the man responsible for both news and editorials, Warren Phillips found the story "newsy" and legitimate. Even Editorial Writer Bartley grumpily concedes that it is factually correct that "many mainstream economists" feel that way.

The Journal may be gray-looking and conservative, but its readiness to use aggressive reporting to offset bellicose editorials is one reason that, in any listing of the nation's best newspapers, it belongs in the top four.