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Gerard Baker. | Wall Street Journal/F. Martin Ramin Upset in WSJ newsroom over editor's directive to avoid 'majority Muslim' in immigration ban coverage

There's some upset in The Wall Street Journal newsroom over a directive from editor in chief Gerry Baker to stop using the phrase "seven majority Muslim countries" in coverage of President Trump's immigration order.

Baker conveyed the message in an internal email Monday night, responding to a breaking news story about Trump's firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Q. Yates for refusing to defend the executive order temporarily barring citizens of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia from entering the country.

"Can we stop saying 'seven majority Muslim countries'? It's very loaded," Baker wrote in an email to editors obtained by POLITICO. "The reason they've been chosen is not because they're majority Muslim but because they're on the list of countRies [sic] Obama identified as countries of concern. Would be less loaded to say 'seven countries the US has designated as being states that pose significant or elevated risks of terrorism.'"

(BuzzFeed reported on the memo first as POLITICO was preparing its own story.)

Other major news outlets, such as The New York Times, have generally referred to the impacted countries as majority Muslim nations, but the Trump administration has been pushing back on the characterization of the order as a "Muslim ban."

Reached for comment, Journal spokeswoman Colleen Schwartz said Baker's email "was part of a larger conversation discussing late breaking developments as a story was being edited on deadline." She also pointed out that in the same email chain, Baker pressed editors to include one more quote from a critic of Trump's order "fairly high up" in the story.

A Journal source said Baker's directive had caused "quite the ruckus among some reporters and editors." As we've reported in recent months, there have been tensions within the Journal's newsroom over its Trump coverage. Some insiders feel it has been too soft and that Baker has steered it in a direction that is less aggressive than the newspaper's major competitors.

"There is no editorial justification for his objection," the source said. "For the EIC of a major American paper to go out of his way to whitewash this is unconscionable."

