WSJ What’s News - WSJ’s Election Coverage: Your Questions Answered

Episode Date: July 14, 2024

In an election season like no other, how is The Wall Street Journal approaching its coverage of political races? WSJ Editor in Chief Emma Tucker answers your questions on how the Journal reports on politics, from polling to deepfakes, from fact-checking to retaining readers’ and listeners’ trust. Luke Vargas hosts. Further Reading: Behind Closed Doors, Biden Shows Signs of Slipping  Trump’s Debate Performance Marked by Familiar Theme: Falsehoods  The Deepfake Election Has Arrived  New Era of AI Deepfakes Complicates 2024 Elections  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's Better in our world. And this week, with the Republican National Convention getting underway tomorrow and a campaign for president in full swing, our editor-in-chief Emma Tucker joins me to discuss how The Wall Street Journal is covering the election in a highly polarized political climate. You call in with questions and we're here to get you some answers. So let's do it. Emma Tucker, it's always good to have you on What's News. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks for having me on, Luke. This is your first U.S. presidential election since you took over the helm of the journal

last year. We sometimes hear from listeners on the podcast and in our comment section on the web that they come to the journal for business news, essentially the subtext there being stay out of politics. But obviously we're not going to do that. Politics is a huge part of our coverage, one of our major areas of focus. But what do you see as the value add that the journal brings to politics that maybe sets us apart from our peers? Well, I think it's worth pointing out that these days, it's not possible to fully separate

politics from business. Business is politics. Politics is business. The two are so intertwined that it goes without saying that we will always do ample coverage of politics. And it's a core part of what we do. And there's absolutely no question that readers want it from us. There's a real hunger for straight, trustworthy, fair political coverage in the areas that really, really matter to them.

It's also worth pausing to reflect that even if this was my 20th US election, this is an election like no other. It's completely unique. The rematches between two past candidates, they're both known quantities. We've just recently had a presidential debate that upended the entire narrative of the election. The rematches between two past candidates, they're both known quantities. We've just recently had a presidential debate that upended the entire narrative of the election. We've got a completely new set of circumstances and fresh eyes. So not just my fresh eyes, but also our new D.C. coverage chief, Damon Paletta. He's new to the job. And I think that's a big advantage because we have got to find new ways of covering this very unusual election in the most engaging ways we can. You say the audience is there for this coverage.

Yeah. That said, are there stories that we're either not covering or that we're seeing a drop off in audience for when the election horse race is getting so much attention? Readers know both candidates. They need no introduction. So our focus, I think, is more on breaking news, lifting the lid on stories around what's going on inside the camps, the stories that the camps would rather we didn't tell readers, whether that's digging into Biden's fitness for office or whether it's looking at Trump's machinations around how he's going to influence the Fed if he comes to power. looking at Trump's machinations around how he's going to influence the Fed if he comes to power. Our job is to stand right back and make sure we're delivering the stories that matter rather than the stories that the camps want us to tell. I mean, on Biden's fitness for office,

what is your feeling on unnamed sources among the administration officials who are apparently concerned with Biden slipping, no one went on the record. And as the election nears, I imagine we're not going to be expecting many folks to be willing to break rank and be named in our more sensitive and potentially important stories. And yet members of the audience will definitely bristle at that. With the story, the Biden age story that we did, we had spoken to people from both parties. I have great faith in the reporters. I trust them. I know what their sourcing is.

We would always rather, rather name sources. But sometimes in order to get a story published, you're just going to have to use those anonymous sources and put your faith in the reporters and their trustworthiness, which is obviously, if they walk for the Wall Street Journal, it is something that can be relied upon. In terms of how we go about our political reporting and present information objectively, we got this question, Emma, from Violet Wysong in Wawaka, Indiana. Let's play that. I would like to understand how representative the polling is, how broad a picture, accurate

a picture of the demographics of the United States, but also how accurate a picture of the variety of people who are likely to vote. As it happens, we have experts in the building for this one, Emma. So I caught up with journal editor Aaron Zittner, who had this to tell us. When The Wall Street Journal conducts a political survey, we start with all voters who are registered to vote across the country. And we randomly sample them to get a good mix of people. And we watch the composition of our polling sample to make sure that it mirrors the true composition, the mix of people who are in the electorate. We want to make sure that our sample is representative of the voting public. Emma, even when it is possible to poll someone who's far away

from New York or the Beltway or where our reporters are often based who cover politics? How do we make sure that our coverage captures the actual perspectives of people from all over the country? This can be the source of major blind spots for the media in elections, and it has been in recent years. Absolutely. And it's not something that we want to get caught out on again. I mean, I think it's really important for us to be on the ground looking at what's going on across the country. The American economy is not one economy. It's multiple economies. And we've recently created a new economics team. It's reporting different stories from different places, the micro economies that revolve around different cities, but also from different demographies.

We've had the story recently about these boomers in Texas who are keeping various economies there afloat because they've decided to move there for their retirement. So we have the polling and I would put our polling up against anyone's. I think it's excellent. We spend a huge amount of time and resources on it. But we also have dedicated teams on the ground looking at what's going on in different parts of the country so that, you know, with luck, we don't miss the stories that are creeping up on us or that crept up on us in 2016 without this feeling afterwards that somehow the mainstream media hadn't captured what was going on there. Another question raised by 2016 was what the role of the

media was in fact-checking the candidates, something that listener Tom Horan from Thousand Oaks, California, wanted to know about. Let's play his question. As we come up upon what is bound to be a very contentious election, how will you deal with many of the bombastic claims made on both sides that are totally unfactual? And how will you do fact checking on those? Emma, this is also something that another listener, Jim Randall from Millville, Delaware, was asking about how we're planning to position ourselves in terms of informing,

educating readers when false claims have been made. We're not going to be stenographers for what they're saying, but equally, we're not going to sort of fact check every last claim. Now, our readers are smart. I think it's important that we call out false narratives or obviously things that aren't true. But equally, I don't want to nanny our readers. We want to be fair and balanced. We want to give people what they need to know. We want to call out obvious untruths, but appreciate that our readers are smart and can make up their own minds. Now, the bigger question that we need to answer is, why are they telling these falsehoods? What are they trying to conceal? So that we're actually giving some context to what they're saying or claiming. All right, we've got to take a very short break. But when we come back with Emma Tucker, we'll be talking about the steps we take to uphold objectivity. Also, how we balance journalistic priorities with the demands

of the news business. Stay Infrastructure, or OCI. OCI is the single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Do more and spend less, like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic. Take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash wallstreet. oracle.com slash wallstreet. Another topic that often arises in discussions about the journal stems from our ownership. You recently told Vanity Fair that Rupert Murdoch, the chairman emeritus of our parent company, News Corp, quote, never interferes with what we're doing. There's also, as I've seen, a very strong firewall between our news division and our opinion pages. However, some readers nonetheless assume our reporting must be right-leaning as a result of our ownership, some of the opinions you can find in the paper.

Does that create an additional burden for our reporters, for our editors, then, to be seen as nonpartisan? No, I don't think it does create an extra burden on them because the starting point is that they are nonpartisan and every reporter on The Wall Street Journal knows and understands that. So there's no extra burden there because that is their job. To that end, it is important that we're seen to be living and breathing our mission, which is to be unbiased. So we have very, very strict social media guidelines. Our reporters, our journalists are not allowed to express any sort of political opinion on social media. We don't sign letters behind any sort of campaign,

political or not. When reporters are approaching people with questions, we ask that their questions be unbiased. And we're great believers in no surprises journalism. Everybody needs to be able to have their say. If we're making allegations about people or companies or whoever, then they have a right to reply. We want to be fair. And we want to be seen to be fair. Back to the election and to the candidates and this issue of how we treat false claims, if and when they come up. We had this question from David Anstad of Media Pennsylvania. How will the Wall Street Journal ensure that

the use of deep fakes, the technology that's out there and widely available to both people inside and outside the country to influence the election? how will the Wall Street Journal ensure that the source of the information that is being reported on is real? Emma, I mean, this is going to be huge, this election. I mean, we can almost sort of feel that this could come up. What is our plan for dealing with deepfakes? Well, there's no outright detection solution to this problem. Well, there's no outright detection solution to this problem. But I would say that we are very, very careful to check images and video and aim to ascertain their provenance. So we can do that by cross-checking against other sources, using our journalistic judgment. We have very strict policies on image alteration.

If we're in any doubt, we would always err on not publishing. So we're treading very, very carefully in this field. We can't afford to screw up here. I want to finally ask you about balancing all of these journalistic priorities that we've spoken about here with your priorities, running a news business, which is a business at the end of the day. Our listener, Antonio Ramos from Clio, Alabama, had this comment. The headlines are really just trying to trigger a response, a reaction, and they're just trying to enrage people. And I feel that with the Wall Street Journal, you guys don't really do that.

You guys are more fair and more honest, I would say. Emma, you have recently spoken about the importance of not only reporting stories better, but also selling them better. That is a part of what we need to do. Can we grow our subscriber numbers, boost our engagement, these other things that you've set as priorities, without falling into that trap that Anthony was laying out there? 100% we can do that. Absolutely everything that we're doing is aimed at making our journalism more engaging and more compelling. Now, we definitely don't want to enrage, we want to engage. So to the point that the listener made about headlines, our readers will punish us. If we put a sort of sexy, for want of a better word, headline on a story that then doesn't deliver.

It will annoy readers and they will disengage. Having said that, there's nothing wrong in a good headline, a good compelling headline. And we have no shame in putting headlines on that make people want to read the story. But the bottom line is a good headline has to be matched by a good story. Emma Tucker is the editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal. Emma, thank you so much for the time. Thank you. And that's it for What's News Sunday for July 14th.

Today's show was produced by Charlotte Gartenberg with deputy editors Scott Salloway and Chris Zinsley. I'm Luke Vargas, and we'll be back tomorrow morning with a brand new show. And as always, thanks for listening.