October 9, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: The Seven Fat Years and How to Do It Again.

—Then-Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, 1992.

The New Hotness? Wall Street Journal vs. Treasury Secretary Bessent Erupts as Pre-Election Blood Feud.

Too bad the Ultimate Fighting Championship stage has been taken down from the White House lawn, because if it were still there, it’d provide a venue for what is emerging as one of the bitterest and most consequential political and economic fights in the run-up to the midterm elections: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent versus the Wall Street Journal, and in particular the Journal’s Federal Reserve reporter and “chief economics correspondent,” Nick Timiraos.

Bessent targeted Timiraos in a social media post in August that has amassed nearly 4 million views. “One of the highlights of the Warsh Fed has been watching stenographers posing as journalists, like the WSJ’s Nick Timiraos, reduced to reporting Fed backroom gossip because they’re incapable of performing real economic or monetary policy analysis without being spoon-fed,” Bessent wrote.

The feud got even hotter this week, with the Journal publishing a breathless front-page news article on October 7 under four bylines with the not exactly earthshattering scoop that Bessent “can excoriate staff when he is frustrated”—as if no one in the Wall Street Journal newsroom, or Washington Bureau, or elsewhere in the media empire controlled by Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, has ever expressed frustration in direct terms at a staffer. Buried in the article is the disclosure that “the Treasury Department blocked a Journal reporter from attending a press conference” and “the department also revoked the credentials of reporters from the Journal … to cover a G-20 finance ministers summit in North Carolina.”

Roger Kimball responds:

Exit question:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll