White House honors conservative journalist

In awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Wall Street Journal editor emeritus Robert Bartley yesterday, the Bush White House honored the driving force behind the combative, controversial, and conservative editorial page that helped invent supply-side economics, advocated for a muscular foreign policy, and campaigned relentlessly against Bill Clinton.

The medal is the nation's highest civilian honor. A White House statement called Bartley, who ran the Journal's editorial page from 1972 to 2002, "a champion of free markets, individual liberty, and the values necessary for a free society," as well as "one of the most influential journalists in American history."

The 66-year-old Bartley, a soft-spoken Iowan, liked to use the term "muzzle velocity" to describe the power he wanted his opinion page to convey.

In 1980, he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said that "the point of editorial pages is to provoke debate" and added that Bartley had "changed politics, changed economic thinking, and changed editorial writing. I think he transformed editorial writing in America."

"It would be interesting to see if the Bush White House would give the award to a liberal editorial writer," he added.

Jim Naureckas, of the liberal media watchdog group FAIR, said, "if decades of producing partisan propaganda is a service to freedom, then I guess [Bartley] deserves a medal."

Bartley's page was quick to choose up sides in the ideological wars. It railed against taxes, unions, and product-liability lawsuits, and upheld an editorial philosophy of "free markets and free people."

One of Bartley's most frequent targets was the Clinton presidency.

Under his watch, the Journal's editorial page explored the theory that deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster had been murdered. It broke the explosive 1999 news that an Arksansas woman was accusing Clinton of a 1978 sexual assault.

Little wonder that a PBS progam once called Bartley's fiefdom "perhaps the most influential, the most articulate, the most ferocious opinion page in the country."

In receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Bartley joins such media luminaries as former Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and former New York Times executive editor A.M. Rosenthal.

Other recipients have included home run king Hank Aaron and comedian Bill Cosby.