[[organizations/the-wall-street-journal|The Wall Street Journal]] appears in The Bob Zadek Show as a recurring reference point rather than as a topic in its own right. Across the excerpts it functions in three distinct ways: as an actor inside a story about insider trading, as the publisher of a guest’s op-ed, and as the employer of a guest. Bob Zadek also describes his own changing relationship to the paper as a reader.
The Equity Funding story
In an episode on insider trading, Bob Zadek recounts the story of Ray Dirks and Equity Funding, a life insurance company whose stock was rising. Dirks, described as a hardworking stockbroker in the 1970s, received a call from a man named Secrest, an Equity Funding employee angry about being shorted on his Christmas bonus, who told him the company was a fraud whose employees wrote phony policies on weekends to satisfy regulators and auditors Legalize Insider Trading (2009).
Dirks investigated, concluded it was a fraud, and called the Wall Street Journal. According to Bob’s account, the paper said, “Well, it’s a publicly traded company, it’s all hearsay, we don’t want to go public yet.” Dirks then went to the SEC, which also declined to move. He told his institutional clients to sell Equity Funding; he made not a dime, the company collapsed, and its president went to jail. The SEC censured Dirks for sharing inside material non-public information, and he fought the censure to the US Supreme Court, where Ronald Reagan’s Solicitor General argued against the SEC and the Court said Dirks did nothing wrong Legalize Insider Trading (2009).
Bob’s account gives the Journal a second appearance in the same story: after the stock plummeted from 30 to 15, the SEC investigated, and then the Wall Street Journal published the story because it was by then all over the trade press. Bob frames the episode as showing how random the “crime” is and how arbitrary the enforcement Legalize Insider Trading (2009). Guest Don Boudreaux, who said he had not heard the story, responded that Dirks saved his clients from losses and helped expose the fraud earlier than it would otherwise have been exposed, and that the SEC’s pursuit of Dirks made his blood boil Legalize Insider Trading (2009).
The Journal as publisher and employer
In an episode on overcriminalization, Bob Zadek introduces guest Brian Walsh by citing a piece Walsh recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Time to Arrest the Federal Criminalization Spree.” Bob also notes Walsh’s prior position as executive director of the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s American Religious Freedom Program and a piece written with Heritage, “One Nation Under Arrest: How Crazy Laws, Rogue Prosecutors, and Activist Judges Threaten Your Liberty” “You’re Under Arrest!”: Overcriminalization with Brian Walsh (2015).
Walsh explains that the piece was prompted by good news: a number of organizations — the Heritage Foundation where he used to work, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and others — had worked for about a dozen years on Capitol Hill to get Congress to criminalize in a more principled, more circumspect manner. The positive development was that the new House of Representatives adopted a rules change proposed about eight years earlier, making it more likely that the House Judiciary Committee would oversee all new criminalization, which until then had been floating through every committee on Capitol Hill “You’re Under Arrest!”: Overcriminalization with Brian Walsh (2015). Walsh adds that federal criminal law has exploded over the past 40 to 50 years in particular “You’re Under Arrest!”: Overcriminalization with Brian Walsh (2015).
In a later episode on the corporate income tax, Bob Zadek introduces Richard Rubin as the US tax policy reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Washington, focusing on taxes, politics and economics. Bob tells listeners that through a process of attrition the Wall Street Journal has become the only provider of objective news he allows access to his brain — “I have culled the herd, and they are the last media outlet standing” — and that he relies heavily on its information in making his personal decisions. He notes Rubin previously covered tax policy at Bloomberg and the Congressional Quarterly, wrote extensively about local governments and transportation policy, and began his career, Bob believes, with the Charlotte Observer Auditing the Corporate Income Tax (2021).
The Journal as a reader’s habit
In an episode on the Capitol riot, Bob Zadek describes his own media history: for most of his intellectual life his day started with the daily newspaper — every day The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal — and he watched the evening news like every other American who paid attention. By 2021, he says, his household had taken a solemn oath not to watch the news. His argument is that news became entertainment, and that once news becomes entertainment, fighting for eyeballs and earlobes of attention for commercial purposes, its success is measured by a different matrix: entertainment equals emotional excitement, and the news excites not by making you smarter and more informed but by getting you fearful or angry The Capitol Riot in Context (2021).
Across episodes
The excerpts show no development in how the Wall Street Journal is treated. It is touched on in the insider trading episode, where it declines Dirks’s tip and later publishes the story; in the overcriminalization episode, as the venue for Brian Walsh’s op-ed; in the corporate tax episode, as the employer of Richard Rubin and as Bob Zadek’s last trusted outlet; and in the Capitol riot episode, as one of the papers Bob once read daily before giving up the news. No guest or host in these excerpts argues about the Journal’s coverage or editorial stance as such, and the references do not build on one another.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts say nothing about the Wall Street Journal’s founding, ownership, editorial page, or reporting practices beyond the specific items named. They do not describe what the Journal published about Equity Funding beyond Bob Zadek’s account, nor the content of Walsh’s op-ed beyond its title. Richard Rubin’s tenure at the paper is mentioned only through Bob Zadek’s introduction, and no excerpt states when Bob Zadek’s reading habits changed or what replaced the Journal in his household.