The Wall Street Journal was criticized Wednesday for its highly unusual decision to let Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. featuring another media organization’s article about him by publishing his response on its opinion pages.
Justice Alito’s essay in the editorial independent section of The Journal ran online Tuesday night with the headline “Justice Samuel Alito: ProPublica Misleads Its Readers.”
An editor at the top of the essay said two ProPublica reporters, Justin Elliott and Josh Kaplan, emailed Justice Alito questions Friday and asked him to respond Tuesday afternoon. “Here’s Judge Alito’s answer,” the editor said.
ProPublica published its investigation into Judge Alito hours later on Tuesday, revealing that he had taken a luxury fishing trip in 2008 as the guest of Paul Singer, a billionaire Republican donor, and had neither disclosed the trip nor withdrawn from cases since then. involved Mr. Singer’s hedge fund.
Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor-in-chief, said in a statement Wednesday that ProPublica always invites people mentioned in articles to comment before publication. ProPublica has published several articles in recent months about potential conflicts of interest between some Supreme Court justices.
“We were surprised to see Judge Alito’s answers to our questions appear in an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal, but we are happy to receive a response in any form,” he said.
“We wonder if The Journal fact-checked the essay before publication,” he added. “We strongly reject the headline’s claim that ‘ProPublica is misleading its readers’, which published the piece without anyone having read the article and without asking us for comment.”
A spokeswoman for The Journal did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, said that while opinion page essays usually get some form of fact-checking, The Journal couldn’t have done that in this case because the ProPublica study hadn’t yet been published. .
“Justice Alito could have published this as a statement on the SCOTUS website,” said Mr. Grueskin, a former top news editor at The Journal, in an email. “But the fact that he chose The Journal – and that the editorial page was willing to serve as his loyal factotum – says a lot about the relationship between the two sides.”
In the article, Judge Alito argued that ProPublica’s claims that he should have withdrawn from certain cases and disclosed certain items in a 2008 financial disclosure report were not valid.
Rod Hicks, the director of ethics and diversity for the Society of Professional Journalists, said that “it’s quite unusual for a news outlet to allow an official to use their platform to respond to questions from another outlet.”
“And it’s completely unheard of to post that response before the other outlet even publishes its story,” he added. “If it weren’t for ethics, professional courtesy should have kept The Journal in check.”
