Wall St. Journal Makes Politics Its Business

Sometimes the Journal would all but ignore breaking news. In 1991, when Anita Hill's allegations of harassment against Clarence Thomas became front-page news across the country, the Journal gave it one paragraph in the front-page roundup column, saying Hill's charge "appears unlikely to delay or affect the outcome" of the Senate confirmation hearings. The next day, after the Thomas saga led the three network newscasts, the Journal ran two paragraphs in the roundup column.

The concept, dating to the 1940s, was that the Journal would be a second read for those who already had digested a local or national newspaper. Brauchli says that approach is now history.

"It's been fabulous to have a much higher appetite for political news during the most interesting campaign of my lifetime," says political columnist Gerald Seib.

The space for political reporting has roughly doubled, insiders say, and even what-happened-yesterday pieces ("Clinton Aims to Push Beyond Ohio and Texas") are winding up on Page 1. The Washington Wire column has been revived. But it is the more enterprising stories that are drawing attention.

The Journal ran a behind-the-scenes piece last month about Hillary Clinton aides Mark Penn and Mandy Grunwald shouting at each other over a disputed commercial, opening the gates to a flood of stories about campaign infighting. An interview with John McCain on economic issues got big play, paired on Page 1 with a report on how a rivalry between blacks and Latinos could help Obama in the Texas primary.

Meanwhile, the fabled A-heds, which often ran at the top of the front page, have been generally pushed to the bottom of the page. On the day when the stories about Bear Stearns and Obama's fundraiser dominated the page, a feature -- squeezed into a tiny space below -- dealt with men buying girdles that are called by less embarrassing names.

John Harwood, a CNBC analyst who left the Journal last year, says the increased campaign coverage "reflects Murdoch's desire for a newsier paper, and for my former colleagues covering politics, that's a great thing. The question that will get asked over time is, does it erode some of the things that made the Journal great in the first place?"

In recent years, says political analyst Charlie Cook, the Journal "became a less essential read" for campaign junkies. "It was just barely above zero. Except for the business coverage and a fun story on the front page, I sure as hell haven't been reading it." Cook says the level of political reporting has improved lately, "but they've lost a lot of their horses."

Beyond politics, the Journal has added a weekly sports page and plans to launch a quarterly magazine that will focus on fashion and travel, which Brauchli promoted earlier this month on a swing through London, Paris and Milan. If that sounds un-Journal-like, he notes that the paper now runs recipes in its two-year-old Saturday edition.

Thomson, rather conveniently, uses the Times as a symbol of what he calls "self-serving" American journalism, describing "a sensibility that fetishizes prizes, that believes the length of a story is a measure of its worth." He says the Times has been unfair in its coverage of the Journal and leans to the left. "The New York Times is generally skewed," Thomson says.

The Times declines to respond in kind, and some Americans may bristle at the British editor's dismissiveness, which highlights that part of the Journal's brain trust was born elsewhere.

The concerns about Murdoch, whose properties range from 20th Century Fox to London's Sun and its topless Page 3 girls, centered on his well-documented history of influencing news judgments. Murdoch, who once donated $1 million to the California Republican Party, has had his New York Post go after selected liberal politicians, and yanked BBC News from his Sky TV satellite service in China to placate the Beijing authorities.