INSKEEP: Would you argue that in both of these cases, your interest or lack of interest in a story is driven by events rather than the interests of your corporate owner or anybody at the publication?

TUCKER: Well, I have to say loudly and clearly The Wall Street Journal newsroom is independent. We cover stories. You know, we have great editors, and we’re thinking short term, medium term and long term about what are the stories that we need to tackle ahead of this election to give our readers – to keep them informed and allow them to make decisions and think ahead and plan ahead and read stories and read journalism that is useful to them?

You know, the economy, by all objective criteria, is doing remarkably well, and yet Americans are not feeling it. Why is that? We’ve done lots of reporting from swing states, but also sort of areas trying to sort of get the identity of places – I mean, America is a vast country; what might be true of one place isn’t necessarily true of another – to try and bring those stories out. And then we do – as you say, we wait for events to come along, and when they do, we cover them.