"Try to cut out some of the noise, some of the panic," Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerry Baker told his staff, according to a person who was there. | Getty Gerry Baker to staff: Criticism of Wall Street Journal's Trump coverage is 'fake news' He said there's been 'a lot of nonsense appearing in the media about how unreliable our reporting is.'

Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerry Baker on Monday mounted a vigorous defense of his newspaper's Donald Trump coverage, pushing back aggressively on months of internal criticism that the venerable broadsheet has been too soft on the real estate mogul and reality television star turned 45th president of the United States.

During a more than 30-minute opening address for a newsroom town hall meeting, according to people who were present, Baker said that anyone who claims the Journal has been soft on Trump is peddling "fake news," and that employees who are unhappy with the Journal's objective, as opposed to oppositional, approach to Trump should work somewhere else. He also read out a list of Trump headlines that he offered as evidence the Journal's coverage has been sufficiently strong and critical.

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"Try to cut out some of the noise, some of the panic," Baker advised the assembled reporters and editors, according to a person who was there.

He said 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. I have an obligation to respond to that and point out that I think that is completely unfair," according to the source.

Concerns about the Journal's Trump report have been simmering since at least the fall, when the paper garnered a reputation for access-driven campaign coverage that stood in contrast to aggressive investigations being pursued by competitors like The New York Times and The Washington Post. The tensions came to a head a couple of weeks ago after many staffers took issue with a late-night email from Baker cautioning them against using the phrase "majority Muslim" when describing countries impacted by Trump's immigration ban. (During the town hall, Baker said he hadn't chosen his words "as carefully as I should" have because he had been asleep.) Journalists at the paper have aired concerns during internal meetings with editors as well as on a private email chain that has been circulating for months.

Baker, a veteran British editor and columnist who became editor in chief of the Journal in late 2012, is known for his conservative bona fides, which has perhaps fueled some of the internal rumblings that he has at times been resistant to aggressive Trump reporting.

Since POLITICO’s story last week detailing concerns within the newsroom about the Journal’s Trump coverage and Baker’s stewardship of it, numerous additional Journal insiders have come forward to weigh in on the matter, most of them off the record.

Some reinforced what other sources have described as a perception of a rightward tilt in the Journal’s news pages since Baker became editor in chief, not only with how Trump stories are played, but also on coverage of things like climate change, the refugee crisis and other hot-button topics, they said. There’s also been renewed scrutiny, as Jim Rutenberg detailed in The New York Times , about the ties between Trump and Rupert Murdoch, the conservative-leaning mogul and Trump confidant who controls the Journal’s parent company, News Corp.

Additionally, three sources with intimate knowledge of the Journal’s inner workings said that Trump has been known to engage Baker by phone on occasion, which doesn’t mean Trump has personally influenced Baker on coverage matters, but is notable either way. The sources said there have been a handful of times in which Trump has called Baker to complain about coverage. In one such instance several months ago, when a Journal reporter was fact-checking a story with Trump over the phone, Trump said that he would call “Gerry,” said the sources, who were briefed on the conversation. One person with knowledge of the calls said Baker defended his reporters each time.

A White House aide said that the relationship is nothing out of the ordinary between an editor for a major paper and the president.

Baker was not immediately available to comment for this story because the town hall meeting was in progress.

In conversations with POLITICO, other journalists at the paper defended the Journal’s recent Trump reportage, which they said has become much stronger since the election. They said there have been plenty of tough, critical stories about the president and his administration. Among those cited were big front-page features about Trump’s potential conflicts of interest and debts (“ How Donald Trump’s Web of LLCs Obscures His Business Interests ”; “ Trump’s Debts Are Widely Held on Wall Street, Creating New Potential Conflicts ”).

“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.”

While Trump was the most pressing topic covered at Monday's town hall, Baker also took questions about the state of the Journal, which is in the midst of an ambitious digital strategy revamp as it grapples with a sharp print advertising downturn that has negatively impacted the entire newspaper industry.

Baker acknowledged that about 200 people have recently left Dow Jones, the News Corp. unit that includes the Journal, through buyouts and layoffs, but he said no further cuts are planned.

Several people present, including some who have been critical of Baker, said that overall, the hour-and-a-half meeting was well received. They said staff members appreciated Baker's willingness to take confrontational questions and to admit some errors on his part.

"People felt he did do a good job explaining that he’s supportive of our reporters," one journalist said, "and that he wants us to do tough stories on the administration."