Wall Street Journal editors resist the cancel culture

Hundreds of woke employees at the Wall Street Journal signed a letter to the paper’s publisher complaining about the Journal’s op-ed page. The employees protested what they claim is the spread of “misinformation” in the Journal’s opinion section.

One of the complaints focused on the publication of a column by Heather Mac Donald. The letter noted that “employees of color publicly spoke out about the pain [Mac Donald’s] Opinion piece caused them during company-held discussions surrounding diversity initiatives.” Poor babies.

In response to the letter, the editors have published a note to readers. The note states:

We’ve been gratified this week by the outpouring of support from readers after some 280 of our Wall Street Journal colleagues signed (and someone leaked) a letter to our publisher criticizing the opinion pages. But the support has often been mixed with concern that perhaps the letter will cause us to change our principles and content. On that point, reassurance is in order.

In the spirit of collegiality, we won’t respond in kind to the letter signers. Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility in any case. The signers report to the News editors or other parts of the business, and the News and Opinion departments operate with separate staffs and editors. Both report to Publisher Almar Latour. This separation allows us to pursue stories and inform readers with independent judgment.

It was probably inevitable that the wave of progressive cancel culture would arrive at the Journal, as it has at nearly every other cultural, business, academic and journalistic institution. But we are not the New York Times. Most Journal reporters attempt to cover the news fairly and down the middle, and our opinion pages offer an alternative to the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today’s media.

As long as our proprietors allow us the privilege to do so, the opinion pages will continue to publish contributors who speak their minds within the tradition of vigorous, reasoned discourse. And these columns will continue to promote the principles of free people and free markets, which are more important than ever in what is a culture of growing progressive conformity and intolerance.

“Free people and free markets”? “Progressive conformity and intolerance”? Maybe this note to readers should have come with a trigger warning to protect the 280 signers of the letter and others who are similarly woke.

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