11 May 2005

James Taranto Editor OpinionJournal.com Dear James, Your column “Watching the Watchers” has been brought to our attention and I’d like to clarify and correct several points. As I’ve made clear elsewhere we have no problem with Arthur’s Good News blogs in themselves. There is certainly no misrepresentation of them on OpinionJournal.com. It is clear on your site that they are what they are – a cull of media reports and media releases highlighting the good news from Iraq prepared by an Australian blogger. If you check the transcript of our program you will see that we did not state as you assert that OpinionJournal.com is not published by the Wall Street Journal. We did attempt on many occasions to clarify the precise relationship between the WSJ and OpinionJournal.com but our phone calls and emails have still not generated an answer from Dow Jones. My first email to Dow Jones was sent at 2.41pm Friday 6 May 2005. Since then I have sent another two emails to your corporate communication representatives but have generated just one auto reply and no responses. Later I contacted the WSJ where the news desk journalists told me that they couldn’t make any comment. I phoned the desk and mobile phones of another 3 of your corporate representatives but none returned my calls. I eventually spoke to your corporate communications man in Hong Kong who was very helpful but couldn’t answer my question and referred my query to New York. When we still had no response I tried your Corporate Communications Vice President Amy Wolfcale again and was finally lucky enough to catch her on her cell phone. She told me she was very busy but that she would try to get me a response. I never heard from her or Dow Jones again. Given the unresponsiveness of Dow Jones we reported the facts that were clear

“Good News from Iraq is not published on the highly respected Wall Street Journal website — it's a blog published by a sister site.”

e v e r y o n e l o v e s i t u n t i l t h e y ’ r e o n i t GPO box 9994 sydney 2001

ph (02) 8333-4454 fax (02) 8333-4962 www.abc.net.au/mediawatch

e v e r y o n e l o v e s i t u n t i l t h e y ’ r e o n i t GPO box 9994 sydney 2001

ph (02) 8333-4454 fax (02) 8333-4962 www.abc.net.au/mediawatch

We don’t see any error for Media Watch there, but as you concede The Australian got it wrong. Where we were wrong was in our report of Arthur Chrenkoff’s relationship with OpinionJournal.com. We said that Arthur was not paid and that his blog (Arthur’s own description) was published without editing. That information came directly from Dr Chrenkoff. I spoke at length to him before this story. Naturally I contacted him after your latest column to clarify why he had given us false information. Arthur has apologised for misleading us and given me permission to provide this quote from our conversation:

Media Watch: Do they pay you? Arthur Chrenkoff: They do actually – a pretty insignificant amount – I started doing it for free but they suggested they might pay me a rather a nominal amount. It’s certainly not in line with what is paid for opinion pieces… I do apologise, with hindsight I should have told you the truth. As I said I was a bit taken aback. I didn’t see how it was relevant to the story but having said that I do apologise. MW: What about editing. Do they edit your pieces? AC: I told you they didn’t edit it because to my mind editing means to make substantial changes, but they do have a look at it before they publish it.

The false information that Dr Chrenkoff provided was not significant, but we apologise for those small errors. We’ll put a correction on our website. We stand by our argument that The Australian’s columnist Janet Albrechtsen misrepresented the nature and source of “Good News from Iraq”. Yours sincerely, Peter McEvoy Executive Producer Media Watch