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Steelworkers Demand Apology After Wall Street Journal Makes $800,000 Error
The latest entry in the “you can’t believe everything you read in the mainstream media” category comes from The Wall Street Journal. On Monday, the paper ran an editorial attacking congressional Democrats who voted to trim $2 million from the budget of the Office of Labor Management Standards.
Somewhere in the mix, the Journal’s editors singled out United Steelworkers (USW) member Jimmy Warren, a local union financial officer from Arkansas. The editors claimed Warren’s local paid him $825,262.
But here’s the rub. The Journal got it so wrong it would be comical if it weren’t such an egregious mistake. If the editors had spent just a few minutes checking the financial report for his local, which is available free to the public online, they would have easily found the truth—the records clearly show Warren was paid $8,252.62, not $825,262, a difference of, oh, more than $817,000.
The Journal, which makes no apologies for its anti-worker, pro-Big Business editorial stance and prides itself on telling the “what does it mean” stories, got it wrong big time.
The USW is demanding an apology from the newspaper after it ran what the union calls a “vitriol- and-error-filled Monday editorial” that grossly misrepresented the amount of money Warren received.
The newspaper tried to clean up its act and printed a correction after the union complained. But its correction, which blamed the Department of Labor website for the error, did not mention how much of a difference there really was between what the editorial said and the truth.
As the USW said in a statement:
The troubling fact remains that one of the world’s most widely read financial journals has displayed irresponsibility with regard to fact-checking that insults its readers, to say nothing of the paper’s obvious contempt for working men and women.
When media mogul Rupert Murdoch earler this year purchased Dow Jones, the company that owns the Journal, many of the paper’s reporters and editors said they feared Murdoch, who also owns Fox TV and the New York Post, would water down and politicize the news. Maybe they should also have been concerned about the editorial page as well.
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1 Comment
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“The Journal, which makes no apologies for its anti-worker, pro-Big Business editorial stance ” says it all. Any apology at all would be only to keep themselves out of legal hot water.
The best use of the WSJ since Rupert Murdoch took over is to line bird cages (the bird will show his opinion of WSJ), use it for puppy training (same as bird opinion) or for wrapping garbage to toss in the garbage can……