Gerry Baker, editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, strongly defended his newspaper's coverage of Donald Trump and fought back against internal criticism the newspaper has being too soft on the president, Politico is reporting.
Quoting unnamed people who were present, the website says Baker told a meeting of his staff that anyone who claims the paper has been too easy on Trump is peddling "fake news."
He added they should work somewhere else if they were unhappy.
He is said to have read out headlines in the Journal as proof the Trump coverage has been strong and critical.
Baker said: "Try to cut out some of the noise, some of the panic," a person at the meeting told Politico.
Baker added there's been "a lot of nonsense appearing in the media about how unreliable our reporting is, that we're being soft on Donald Trump," according to Politico's source. "I have an obligation to respond to that and point out that I think that is completely unfair."
Baker became editor five years ago, and since then, sources have told Politico they have noticed a rightward tilt in the Journal's news pages.
But other staffers defended the newspaper and cite instances where it has been critical of the president.
"Since the election, we've spent a lot of time and energy doing investigative projects on Trump," David Enrich, the Journal's financial investigations editor, told Politico, "and those stories almost entirely have received prominent placement in print and online, and the reaction internally to them has been uniformly positive.
"There's been no pushback, no interference. The main message has been for us to keep digging as aggressively as we can."