WSJ sends Iraq correspondent on vacation till after election

[quaoar]

This is the reporter who sent a private email to friends telling them how truly horrible it is to be in Baghdad and the email got into circulation and was posted everywhere.

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/cl-et-rutten2oct02.column

Splashing this sort of stuff around the Internet is bound to cause talk, and a good bit of it occurred in the Journal's newsroom. Wednesday, two of the paper's staff members — both of whom asked not to be identified — said they had been told that Fassihi would not be allowed to write about Iraq for the paper until after the election, presumably because unauthorized publication of her private correspondence somehow called into question the fairness of her journalism.

< snip >

So was Fassihi told not to write about Iraq by WSJ editors until after Nov. 2? It seemed an easy matter to resolve, though — as it turns out — very little in this uneasy moment yields to easy resolution.

Paul Steiger, the Journal's managing editor, was unavailable by phone Thursday, but his spokesman, Robert Christie, accepted a question on his behalf and agreed to put it to the editor: Had Fassihi's e-mail been the subject of discussion among her editors and had they decided that its dissemination should prevent her from writing about Iraq until after Nov. 2?

Christie forwarded Steiger's response by e-mail: "Ms. Fassihi is coming out of Iraq shortly on a long planned vacation. That vacation was planned to, and will, extend past the election."

[liberalmuse]

1. Unreal.

Soviet-style censorship of the truth. We know where the WSJ stands, don't we? Hell, we know where the entire mainstream media stands.

[Owlet]

2. Well, it must be so

..because the Wall Street Journal says it's so. I wonder where they'll bury her termination.

[mikehiggins]

3. Ah yes. Tell the truth. Get squashed.

Not that I have any tears to shed for her or any of the talking heads on tv or the whores of the press.

She got screwed because she told the truth in private.

What then, are we to make of what she wrote in public?

Is it some sort of "other" truth?

In Catholic school, they used to call that "lies", even if they were lies of omission, by leaving out relevent parts of the truth.

This time, this person, got in trouble for telling the truth without the filters.

Betcha all her peers learned something from this.

Can't even tell the truth in private.

Kudos to whoever did tell the truth by passing on that email.

[Demit]

4. maybe the reporter leaked her own email to get out the unfiltered truth

and still keep her job.

(I'm clinging to the belief that there are still honest journalists who care about their core purpose. It's hard hanging on, but...)

[Supersedeas]

5. That'll do for Iraq coverage--back to ballot initiative designed to divide

and fire up the base