As a venue and a reference in the insider-trading debate
The Wall Street Journal figures in the show’s treatment of insider trading chiefly as the outlet that declined, at first, to publish the Equity Funding fraud story. Bob Zadek recounts that Ray Dirks, a stockbroker in the 1970s, was tipped off by a man named Secrest, an employee of the life insurance company Equity Funding, who said the company was a fraud whose stock was nonetheless rising. Dirks investigated, then called the Wall Street Journal, which according to Zadek said the matter was hearsay about a publicly traded company and that it did not want to go public yet. Dirks then went to the SEC, which also declined to act, before telling his institutional clients to sell Equity Funding; the company collapsed and its president went to jail. Zadek notes that Dirks made no money and was censured by the SEC for sharing inside information, and that the censure was later removed after he fought it to the Supreme Court Legalize Insider Trading (2009).
Zadek’s account places the Journal alongside the SEC as an institution that failed to act on a fraud until the stock price fell. He says that once the stock plummeted from 30 to 15, the SEC investigated, and that the Wall Street Journal then published the story because it was all over the trade press. Guest Don Boudreaux responds that Dirks saved his clients from losses and helped expose the fraud earlier than it would otherwise have been exposed. The episode uses the Journal as a measure of how the fraud story traveled: the paper is the second institution Dirks approached, and the one that eventually published once the price move made the story unavoidable Legalize Insider Trading (2009).
As a publisher of arguments against overcriminalization
In a 2015 episode on overcriminalization, the Journal appears as the venue for a piece by guest Brian Walsh. Bob Zadek introduces Walsh by noting he had recently written a piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “Time to Arrest the Federal Criminalization Spree,” and asks what prompted it. Walsh answers that the piece was prompted by a rules change adopted by the new House of Representatives, which he and organizations including the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers had proposed about eight years earlier. The change, Walsh says, makes it more likely that the House Judiciary Committee will oversee all new criminalization, which previously floated through every committee on Capitol Hill “You’re Under Arrest!”: Overcriminalization with Brian Walsh (2015).
Walsh describes federal criminal law as out of control and as having exploded over the past 40 to 50 years in particular, and says Congress is well past time to rein it in and make it more understandable for the average person. Zadek’s framing of the episode is that the founders envisioned a federal government with no police force whatsoever, whereas there are now hundreds of federal police forces. The Journal here is not analyzed as an institution but cited as the outlet that carried Walsh’s argument into public view “You’re Under Arrest!”: Overcriminalization with Brian Walsh (2015).
As a tax-policy authority and a personal media source
The Journal’s most extended treatment comes in a 2021 episode on the corporate income tax, where guest Richard Rubin is identified as the US tax policy reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Washington. Zadek introduces Rubin by saying that through a process of attrition the Wall Street Journal has become the only provider of objective news he allows to have access to his brain, that he has culled the herd and the Journal is the last media outlet standing, and that he relies heavily on the information he gets from it. He also calls Rubin his tax tutor and notes Rubin previously covered tax policy at Bloomberg and the Congressional Quarterly and wrote about local governments and transportation policy, starting his career with the Charlotte Observer Auditing the Corporate Income Tax (2021).
The episode’s subject is the corporate income tax and who bears its burden, along with proposals such as the global minimum tax and the tax strategies of companies like Amazon. The Journal functions here in two ways at once: as the employer of the guest, whose beat is tax policy, politics and economics, and as the one news source Zadek says he still trusts. That dual role — the paper as both a subject-matter authority and a personal filter — is stated by Zadek rather than argued by Rubin, who in the excerpted portion thanks Zadek for having him on Auditing the Corporate Income Tax (2021).
In the discussion of news as entertainment
A 2021 episode on the Capitol riot includes a segment in which Zadek reflects on the media broadly. He recalls that for most of his intellectual life his day started with the daily newspaper, naming The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and that he watched the evening news like other Americans who paid attention. He then says that in 2021 his household has taken what he calls a solemn oath not to watch the news, and that the news has become entertainment, measured by whether it excites emotion rather than by whether it makes viewers smarter and more informed. The Journal appears in this passage only as one of the outlets he once read daily, listed alongside The New York Times The Capitol Riot in Context (2021).
The excerpt breaks off mid-sentence as Zadek develops the point that news success is measured by an entertainment matrix rather than an informational one, so the segment’s conclusion is not available in the source. What the excerpt does establish is that Zadek places the Journal within a media environment he describes as having changed, and that his own consumption of it has changed with it The Capitol Riot in Context (2021).
Across episodes
The Journal recurs across episodes as a reference point rather than a topic: in 2009 as the outlet that initially declined the Equity Funding story, in 2015 as the publisher of Brian Walsh’s piece on federal criminalization, in 2021 as the employer of tax reporter Richard Rubin and the one outlet Zadek says he still trusts, and in 2021 as one of the papers Zadek once read daily before his household stopped watching the news. The excerpts show no development in the show’s treatment of the Journal as an institution; what changes is the role it plays in each argument, from failed gatekeeper to venue to trusted source to remembered habit. No guest in these excerpts offers a sustained assessment of the paper’s coverage or editorial stance.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the Wall Street Journal’s ownership, founding, editorial page, circulation or business model, and they do not state where it is published. They contain no discussion of the Journal’s coverage of the specific stories it is said to have published or declined, beyond the bare fact of publication or refusal. No excerpt states what became of the Equity Funding story after the Journal ran it, or what the outcome was in the Keith Sampson case mentioned in a separate episode. The 2021 media segment ends mid-sentence, so Zadek’s full argument about news as entertainment is not available.