I'm sure the Journal's editor Robert Thomson, who was recently brought in by Rupert Murdoch to run the newspaper, has no idea the history in play here, but it was supremely ironic that in a statement on Monday he whined about how New York Times editor Bill Keller last year " personally and at length to a prize committee casting aspersions on Journal journalists and journalism."

In Thomson's eyes, Keller's actions were just beyond the pale. What kind of journalists would bad mouth fellow journalists who were up for big awards? (In this case it was for a George Polk Awards in Journalism.) What kind of journalists would try to debunk articles that were being considered for a top journalism prize?

Journalists who work for the Wall Street Journal, that's who.

The headline from a Salon article I wrote in 2002 [emphasis added]:

The Wall Street Journal's smear campaign: The paper's Op-Ed pages have long been a platform for political assassination. But their latest target is a rival paper that is competing for a Pulitzer Prize.

Oh my.

Behold the hypocrisy of the Journal's top editor now whining about Keller's supposed meddling:

At 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon the sounds of champagne bottles popping open will be heard in a select number of newsrooms across the country as the winners of the newspaper industry's most prestigious award, the Pulitzer Prize, are officially announced. While the list of finalists is supposed to remain secret until the winners are declared, word always leaks out in advance. This year is no exception; among the reported Pulitzer finalists in the investigative reporting category is “Uninformed Consent,” a six-part series that ran in the Seattle Times during March 2001.

The report, written by Duff Wilson and David Heath, alleged that during the 1980s a number of patients at Seattle's prestigious Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle (aka the Hutch) died while undergoing experimental bone-marrow transplantation, and that patients were not informed of the clinical trials' risks or of the center's financial interest in those treatments. The series was years in the making and was based on an exhaustive review of 10,000 pages of documents as well as 100 interviews, and was overseen by an independent expert in bone-marrow medicine who reviewed it for accuracy. “Uninformed Consent” has already picked up scores of elite journalism prizes in the past few months, including a George Polk Award, a Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting presented by Harvard's Shorenstein Center, and the Newspaper Guild's Heywood Broun Award.

Up until three weeks ago the series seemed to be a Pulitzer front-runner as well. But that changed on March 19, when Laura Landro, an assistant managing editor for the Wall Street Journal, penned a blunt critique of “Uninformed Consent” for the Journal's Op-Ed page. Titled “Good Medicine, Bad Journalism,” the piece complained that the Seattle Times series was guilty of “gotcha” journalism and that the series' central allegation was “fundamentally false.”

And yes, BTW. Landro managed to derail the Seattle Times' Pulitzer. And yes, Landro's critique was largely bogus.

UPDATED: Note this fact as well:

Even more startling was the fact that the broadside came an entire year after the Seattle Times series ran, but just weeks before the Pulitzer's 16 judges would make their final decisions. The Journal column appeared to be an unprecedented attempt to step in and derail a Pulitzer finalist.

Does WSJ editor Thomson want to rethink his attack on Bill Keller?

UPDATED: As the NYObserver reports, it turns out Keller wrote a letter to the Polk committee after the Journal had won its award. Back in 2002 though, the Journal torpedoed a competitor's Pulitzer before the judges made their pick.