A committee to protect editorial integrity at The Wall Street Journal said on Tuesday it will be more active in the search of a new managing editor for the paper after being blindsided by the resignation of Marcus Brauchli.
The committee, whose duties include the hiring and firing of top Journal editors, learned of Brauchli's departure after the fact, which it said "failed to meet the letter and the spirit" of their agreement with owner News Corp.
To some media watchers, the statement raised questions about the group's effectiveness in maintaining the Journal's editorial independence after parent Dow Jones & Co was bought last year by Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate.
"The whole structure is so transparently ridiculous that I don't think anybody believes it," said Edward Wasserman, a journalism ethics professor at Washington and Lee University and a media columnist at The Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post.
"The committee is putting out a statement basically acknowledging their complete irrelevance to the process," he said.
The committee was set up at the insistence of the Bancroft family as a condition to selling their interest in Dow Jones to News Corp in a $5.6 billion deal. Some family members feared Murdoch would use the Journal to advance his own interests and the committee was designed to stop that from happening.
In the statement, the committee said it has not been made aware of any issues of editorial independence or integrity at the Journal by Brauchli or News Corp.
Brauchli told committee members that he was "approached two weeks earlier and told that News Corp wanted to make a change in the managing editor," the committee said in the statement.
The committee admitted it had no authority to block a resignation like Brauchli's, but said "learning of the Brauchli matter after the fact failed to meet the letter and the spirit of the agreement."
"The committee intends to exercise fully its role in the approval of a successor managing editor and to take the steps necessary to prevent a repeat of the process it has just been through," the statement also said.
Brauchli, who has accepted a job as a News Corp consultant, was not immediately available to confirm the statement.
The committee plans to meet with Journal Publisher Robert Thomson to discuss ideas it has for more comprehensive participation, but the group's chairman, Tom Bray, declined to talk about them.
"There is not much to be served by expounding on those things," he told Reuters.
Thomson was not immediately available for comment.
Bray is a former editorial page editor at The Detroit News and a former reporter and editorial page staff member at the Journal. Other members include former Associated Press Chief Executive Louis Boccardi and former Chicago Tribune Editor and Tribune Co Publisher Jack Fuller.
The committee said its members were first informed of the resignation of Brauchli by News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch on April 21 in separate phone calls.
Time magazine broke the story on its website that evening, followed shortly by the Journal. Dow Jones announced the news the next day.
"There is absolutely no suggestion from the Special Committee that the integrity of the Journal's reporting or of its reporters has been compromised in any way whatsoever," a spokesman for Dow Jones said on Tuesday.
