David Carr’s elegant New York Times dissection of the editorial agreement between the News Corporation and the Wall Street Journal revealed that Paul A. Gigot, the Journal’s editorial-page editor, helped to write it. This could generate a momentary surge of sympathy for Rupert Murdoch.

Historically, Carr pointed out in his piece on Aug. 6th, the editorial page is “the sandbox of the publishing side of any newspaper, the place where owners can make their positions plain.” Yet, he wrote, the agreement gives Gigot “the authority to choose editorial board members, columnists, the editor of the op-ed section, the editors of the book review and other sections, and, most significant, the final say over both op-ed pieces and editorial positions.”

Moreover, Carr wrote, “If the agreement is followed to the letter, that means Mr. Murdoch cannot change editorial page editors or mandate editorial positions, something every other newspaper publisher in the country takes for granted.”

Gigot’s hand on the editorial tiller may be at least as dreaded as Murdoch’s. The Journal’s editorial page has “always been its own little kingdom, known for a medieval brand of conservatism,” Carr wrote. “[T]the men and women who make news calls for The Wall Street Journal often find themselves confused with their crazy cousins at the back of the first section.”

In Murdoch’s newsrooms, he has doubtless been called many things. But crazy? It’s not only craziness that’s worrisome about Gigot’s crew; it’s also that the widely applauded ethical standards of the Journal’s newsroom have so often been imperiously disdained in the editorial offices.

Gigot’s standards for himself don’t seem very high. One instance involves his dealings with Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, who was for a while chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The inspector general of the CPB concluded that Tomlinson “violated statutory provisions and the Director’s Code of Ethics by dealing directly with one of the creators [Gigot] of a new public affairs program [The Journal Editorial Report] during negotiations with PBS and the CPB over creating the show.” It takes two to tango, so if Tomlinson was behaving unethically, Gigot was helping him do so, it seems safe to say.

In something that involved me personally, Tomlinson sent Gigot stolen emails regarding Bill Moyers – including email correspondence between Moyers and me – much to Gigot’s apparent enjoyment. [Click here and go to Page 13.]

After Tomlinson quit in disgrace, and after the report had cost CPB millions of dollars, Gigot praised him for “for defending the importance of balance and diversity on public television.”

Aside from Gigot, others on the editorial page have engaged, with no apparent penalties, in conduct that I’m sure would be firing offenses for Journal news reporters. For example, there is the case of John Fund, who was a member of the Journal’s editorial board from 1995 through 2001, and who now writes the weekly “On the Trail” column for OpinionJournal.com. In “The Hunting of the President,” Joe Conason and Gene Lyons documented that Fund and fellow Journal editorial writer Micah Morrison were in Arkansas as active co-conspirators in Richard Mellon Scaife’s Arkansas project to destroy Bill Clinton. Was Fund penalized? Not that I know of.

Not to worry about the Journal’s editorial page standards, wrote L. Gordon Crovitz in a Publisher’s Letter” on Aug. 1:

“Readers equally must trust that our opinions, agree or disagree, reflect only the honest view of Journal editorial writers, rooted in a consistent set of principles that the Journal has adhered to for decades.” He went on to say, “News Corp. and the Bancrofts [the owning family] agreed on standards modeled on the long-standing Dow Jones Code of Conduct. These include:…

“Opinions represent only the applicable publication’s own editorial philosophies centered around the core principle of ‘free people and free markets’;…

“There are no hidden agendas in any journalist undertakings…”

As his predecessors had done for decades, Crovitz, publisher of the Journal (and president of Dow Jones Consumer Media Group) since February 2006, has turned a blind eye to the strange mix of craziness and questionable ethics regularly produced in the editorial shop. But he is more poorly positioned than his predecessors to crack down. Earlier in his career, he himself had contributed to the widespread distrust of Journal editorials and op-ed columnists.

Over many years, while he was a Journal op-ed legal-affairs pundit, Crovitz had falsely quoted court opinions and wrapped quotes around statements that, he would have had his readers believe, came from the opinions, but in fact did not. Stuart Taylor, Jr., documented a long list of such ethical atrocities in “Daily Diatribe of the American Right,” published in the January/February 1989 issue of the American Lawyer.

Dow Jones didn’t fire Crovitz. Instead, it gave him an important assignment in Asia. Now he is responsible, the New York Times has reported, for overseeing “all media that reach consumers, including The Journal, The Journal Online, Barron’s, Barron’s Online, MarketWatch and other Web, television, video and audio properties.”

Crovitz swiftly ascended the Dow Jones ladder while supposedly being faithful to the single ethical standard set for news and opinion by the Dow Jones Code of Conduct: “[I]t is “an essential prerequisite for success in the news and information business that our customers believe us to be telling them the truth.”