The Wall Street Journal's top editor Monday defended the paper's coverage of President Donald Trump — and advised any of his reporters who want a more oppositional tone to go find a job elsewhere.
Monday's town hall meeting between editor-in-chief Gerard Baker and the Journal's editors and reporters came amid staff concerns about the paper's coverage of Trump being less aggressive than The New York Times and Washington Post, Business Insider reported.
The criticism reached a peak after Baker took issue with calling the countries listed in Trump's travel ban "majority Muslim," asking some editors if they could be referred to as terror hotspots that were previously designated as such by the Obama administration, Business Insider reported.
"It's a little irritating when I read that we have been soft on Donald Trump," he told reporters and editors, one unnamed source told the New York Times.
At one point, Baker made a tongue-in-cheek comment that anyone who claims the publication goes soft on covering Trump is proliferating "fake news."
"No one laughed," one attendee told Business Insider.
At Monday's meeting, Baker told employees if they didn't like the Journal's coverage, they should work somewhere else, a source told Business Insider.
The Huffington Post reported that David Enrich, a Wall Street Journal editor, tweeted afterward that Baker was broadly speaking about "staffers unhappy with our approach - i.e. objective rather than oppositional."
Baker was also asked if the Journal's credibility was hurt by media mogul and Journal owner Rupert Murdoch being publicly friendly with Trump, as the president tweeted.
Baker countered the staff is free to report as it sees fit, Business Insider reported.
Baker is a longtime British editor and columnist who worked at Murdoch's Times of London before moving over to the Journal and later taking over as editor of the publication in 2013.
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