GOODY TWO SHOES: The Stiletto 1, Stuart Karle 0
Stuart Karle, vice president and general counsel of The Wall Street Journal since 1992, has been fired by Dow Jones chief counsel, Mark Jackson, who was installed by new owner Rupert Murdoch while the ink on the acquisition papers was still slightly smudgy.
Karle, a First Amendment lawyer and former Journal reporter declined to tell Legal Times why he was fired, and an anonymous source let slip to The New York Observer that he was told to clear out by the end of March. In a telephone interview with The Observer, Karle confirmed his firing, and said: “I love all the work I've done here.”
That work included an unsuccessful attempt to intimidate this blogger with a threatening “lawyer letter” - hand-delivered to the wrong target, by the way – to relinquish her free-speech rights and cease and desist her whistleblowing about a long-standing breach of the Dow Jones Code of Conduct that involved OpinionJournal.com editor James Taranto’s repeatedly publishing and promoting the amateurish work of his girlfriend, Heather Robinson, without so much as a conflict of interest disclosure to readers. The letter from Karle inadvertently confirmed he knew of the relationship between Taranto and Robinson, which may have created legal jeopardy for Dow Jones should any female employee decide to file a sexual harassment suit – and called into question both the journalistic ethics at The Wall Street Journal and the corporate governance of Dow Jones.
Karle has written at least one op-ed for OpinionJournal, and was no doubt doing Taranto a favor by trying to shut The Stiletto up. The Stiletto can only hope Karle's abrupt dismissal presages a long-overdue housecleaning demonstrating a renewed commitment to ethics at The Wall Street Journal. If this is the case, perhaps Taranto should start updating his résumé, this time not using cute wording to fudge the fact that he is a college drop-out.
And to avoid the conflict of interest issues at other publications that she caused at The Journal, Robinson should figure out how to get freelance assignments without her boyfriend’s help – and without inflating her credentials by calling herself an “independent journalist” or by falsely claiming that the handful of freelance columns she wrote for Taranto’s ex-girlfriend Dawn Eden - then an editor at the New York Daily News - make her a “columnist” for the paper.
Food Network chef Robert Irvine’s being canned for “embellishing” his experience should be a warning that people do check these things out.
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