Zadekpedia[[organizations/wall-street-journal|The Wall Street Journal]] is invoked across several episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as a publication, an employer, and a venue for arguments, though no episode in the excerpts takes the paper itself as its subject. It appears in discussions of insider trading, federal criminalization, tax policy, and media consumption.
Ray Dirks and Equity Funding
In the episode on legalizing insider trading, Bob Zadek recounts the story of Ray Dirks, a stockbroker in the 1970s who received a call from a man named Secrest, an employee of Equity Funding, a life insurance company. Secrest told Dirks the company was a fraud, writing phony insurance policies on weekends to satisfy regulators and auditors. Dirks investigated, concluded it was a fraud, and called the Wall Street Journal. According to Zadek, the Journal responded that Equity Funding was a publicly traded company, that the information was hearsay, and that it did not want to go public yet Legalize Insider Trading (2009).
Dirks then went to the SEC, which also declined to act. He told his institutional clients to sell Equity Funding, made no money himself, and the company collapsed; 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 removed the censure. Zadek notes that after the stock plummeted from 30 to 15, the SEC investigated, and the Wall Street Journal then published the story because it was all over the trade press Legalize Insider Trading (2009). Guest Don Boudreaux said he had not heard the story and that Dirks’s actions helped expose the fraud earlier than it would otherwise have been exposed.
Brian Walsh on Federal Criminalization
In the 2015 episode on overcriminalization, Bob Zadek introduces guest Brian Walsh, noting that Walsh had recently written a piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “Time to Arrest the Federal Criminalization Spree.” Zadek describes Walsh as having been an executive director of the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s American Religious Freedom Program and as the author, with Heritage, of “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: organizations including the Heritage Foundation, where he used to work, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers had been working for about a dozen years on Capitol Hill to get Congress to act more circumspectly when creating new criminal laws. 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. Previously, new and modified criminal laws in almost every bill had been floating through every committee. Walsh says federal criminal law has exploded over the past 40 to 50 years in particular “You’re Under Arrest!”: Overcriminalization with Brian Walsh (2015).
Richard Rubin and Tax Policy
In the 2021 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. Zadek tells listeners 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, calling it the last media outlet standing, and that he relies heavily on information from the Journal in making personal decisions Auditing the Corporate Income Tax (2021).
Zadek also notes that Rubin covered tax policy at Bloomberg and the Congressional Quarterly in his past, has written extensively about local governments and transportation policy, and began his career with the Charlotte Observer. The episode’s topic is the corporate income tax, including who bears its burden and proposals such as the global minimum tax Auditing the Corporate Income Tax (2021).
Media Consumption
In the 2021 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. By 2021, he says, his household had taken a solemn oath not to watch the news. He argues that news became entertainment, and that once news becomes entertainment, fighting for eyeballs and attention for commercial purposes, its success is measured by a different matrix: entertainment equals emotional excitement, and news excites by making people fearful or angry rather than smarter and more informed The Capitol Riot in Context (2021).
Across episodes
The episodes show no development in how the Wall Street Journal is treated: it appears in 2009 as the publication that declined Ray Dirks’s tip and later ran the Equity Funding story, in 2015 as the venue for Brian Walsh’s piece on federal criminalization, and in 2021 as the employer of tax reporter Richard Rubin and as one of Bob Zadek’s former daily papers Legalize Insider Trading (2009) “You’re Under Arrest!”: Overcriminalization with Brian Walsh (2015) Auditing the Corporate Income Tax (2021).