The Wall Street Journal's Op-Ed pages have long been a cauldron of unethical journalism. During the Clinton years, the Journal's editorial page czars filled their pages with wild-eyed, tabloid charges about the president and his wife's so-called involvement in murder plots and drug trafficking. But the Journal's news deputies and reporters could always roll their eyes and take comfort in the fact that everyone knew the newspaper's two universes were separate and distinct. The Landro episode, however, is more complicated because she's a senior member of the paper's news team, and statements from the Journal's spokesman suggest that her drive-by column spoke for the entire news operation.

Soon after Landro's column appeared, the Journal's Goldstein told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "It's her view of this particular issue. That's why it was written as an opinion piece and that's why it appeared on the Op-Ed pages." But after the paper began to feel heat for Landro's obvious attempt to keep a competitor from winning a Pulitzer, Goldstein took a tougher line, telling National Public Radio, "With the evidence that the Seattle Times had, that story would not have passed muster in the Wall Street Journal." Suddenly, Landro's column was not just her own opinion, but a reflection of the Journal's news judgment.

If anybody should be sensitive to the charge of trying to blackball a Pulitzer entry, it's the crew at Dow Jones. Consider this irony. Last month New York magazine reported that Wall Street Journal editors were irked because they felt their Enron reporters weren't getting enough credit for bringing the energy company down. Editors complained that their competitors at the New York Times and Washington Post went out of their way to praise a Fortune writer-- not the Wall Street Journal team -- for first disclosing Enron's financial woes. Why were the Journal's editors so miffed? Because they had award-winning hopes for their Enron series. As one angry, anonymous Journal editor told the magazine, "People are trying to queer the [Pulitzer] pitch for the Journal."

Imagine the outrage those touchy Journal editors would have felt if, instead of simply writing fawning profiles of Fortune's young Enron reporter, an assistant managing editor at the New York Times or the Washington Post had written a scathing column in late March about how the Journal's Enron investigation was "fundamentally false," and then denied it was an attempt to skew the Pulitzer judging. (Despite the paper's best efforts, it appears the Journal's Enron series is not a finalist in the Pulitzer's investigative reporting category.)

As the controversy over Landro's column grew, the Journal circled the wagons and responded with a sneering, unsigned editorial that only dug a deeper hole for the paper. Addressing Fancher's charge that Landro couldn't separate her personal cancer experience from her professional duties, the editorial quoted Landro as saying, "This is insulting, patronizing and also, frankly, sexist -- as if I am some bubbleheaded woman who can't separate emotions from professionalism."

Sexist? The Times never even hinted Landro's sex had anything to do with this controversy. Instead, it seemed Landro was grasping for a defense. And there was exquisite irony in the way Wall Street Journal editors, who've killed uncounted trees over the last decade attacking the scourge of political correctness, played the "sexism" card to defend the beleaguered Landro.

The Journal's editorial also harrumphed that "what really needs correcting is reporting standards in Seattle," which was odd since Landro's column didn't raise a single factual objection to the Times' reporting. The main thrust of her criticism was directed at what she charged was the Times' failure to put the Hutch's high-risk clinical trials in the broader context of bone-marrow experimentation in the 1980s. Where the Times' series saw duped patients, Landro preferred to see desperately sick people willing to take any chance to save their lives.

Landro did level one disturbing charge against "Uninformed Consent" -- an allegation that echoed one made by Hutch attorneys. Landro claimed that a Seattle Times reporter "appears to have overstepped the bounds of ethical reporting," by providing information to family members who were suing the Hutch after "Uninformed Consent" was published. But last week, deciding on that very issue, U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik ruled neither the reporter nor the paper overstepped the "bounds of journalism." The judge denied the request by Hutch attorneys that the Times hand over communications between its reporter and family members.

Trying, after the fact, to carve yet another rationale for Landro's broadside, the Wall Street Journal's creative editorial suggested that the Hutch controversy was really about tort reform, insisting that all "Uninformed Consent" succeeded in doing was generating "speculative lawsuits" from surviving family members of Hutch patients who died during clinical treatment. Insisting it was "on the side of patients," the Journal argued, "more patients will suffer if medical advances are tied up in lawsuits or medical bureaucracies." But the editors will have a hard time convincing the families of former Hutch patients that their hearts are with them. During one questionable clinical trial at the medical center, 80 of its 82 patients died.

Finally, the Journal argued that the Seattle Times refused to print a letter Landro wrote the paper one year ago protesting "Uninformed Consent," because then the paper would have had to submit her letter to the Pulitzer jury. The charge makes no sense. Because if you go to the paper's "Uninformed Consent" Web site or scan old copies of the newspaper, you can read the scores of critical letters the paper has published, all of which, according to Pulitzer rules, must be submitted with the nomination if they contain "any significant challenge to the accuracy or fairness of an entry." That, and the fact that a Hutch-related organization had filed an extensive protest with the Pulitzer committee detailing the Times' alleged errors, makes it clear that award judges are well aware of outside faultfinding with the Times.

Landro and the Journal seemed particularly upset that the Times did not publish her letter last year, even though, as Fancher explained, it was among the "hundreds" the paper received in response to "Uninformed Consent." Worse, the Times "didn't acknowledge receipt of the letter," says the Journal's Goldstein. "If they had run that letter [last year] that would have been the end of it."

So dailies be warned. If a senior Wall Street Journal editor writes to complain about your paper's work, acknowledge receiving the letter -- better yet, run it in full, or suffer the consequences.

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