(FORTUNE Magazine) – There's an old saying: ''Never get in a fight with a pig. You'll both get muddy, and the pig will just enjoy it.'' Nevertheless, I leap into the wallow to defend the Wall Street Journal -- in much the same spirit with which one would speak up for a slandered ex-wife. We've had our differences, but she is not the painted lady depicted in a lurid new book, The Power and the Money: Inside the Wall Street Journal (Birch Lane Press: $22.50), written by former Journal ad salesman Francis X. ''Bud'' Dealy Jr. Maybe most folks outside the gossipy little world of journalism couldn't care less about such inside baseball. Yet the Journal is such a fixture in the lives of many serious American business readers that your ears just might perk up were you to hear that: -- It was possible during the Eighties to obtain editorial protection from the Journal simply by having some glitzy billionaire take managing editor Norman Pearlstine to lunch. That's why Henry Kravis and Michael Milken got off so lightly, and it's also why Pearlstine was secretly fired. Or that: -- Then foreign editor Karen Elliott House -- ''a beautiful Veronica Lake look-alike'' -- bedded Jordan's King Hussein to obtain her Pulitzer Prize- winning interview with him. Or that: -- The Journal blew every major story in the Eighties -- the 1987 stock crash, the S&L crisis, and countless others -- because the paper's leadership is so corrupt that it even let beer advertisers, who don't generally advertise in the Journal, sway its coverage. SHOCKING STUFF, even by the jaded standards of the Nineties. Also, like much else in the book, patently untrue. Fabricated. Made up. Those things never happened. I know. I was there. I worked for the Journal for 13 years, and I still count several of the book's chief villains among my friends. Yet I'm hardly a blind apologist. I quit five years ago and have since unloaded most of my Dow Jones stock because I believe it is a company too languid to compete in the information age. Like all great lies, these have just enough fact to lend credibility to the fiction. Yes, Pearlstine hobnobs with the rich and famous, which is why the paper seemed hard-wired to the inside line during the Eighties. But to sell out the paper's integrity to his flashy friends would not only have been out of character for Pearlstine, it would also have proved institutionally impossible. Nor was he fired. Three rich guys put up millions for him to found a media company. What would most of us do? He quit. Yes, Karen House is a bossy, sometimes disagreeable woman who manipulates the power of her husband -- Dow Jones CEO Peter Kann -- for everything it's worth. But Dealy offers not one shred of evidence that House seduced King Hussein for an interview. An editor of her stature has little difficulty getting interviews, and, anyway, it wasn't as if the rest of the world was beating down Hussein's door to talk to him. Like every newspaper, the Journal blows some stories. But the pattern of conspiracy that Dealy beats home is plain stupid. Pearlstine's Eighties edge is what made the Journal a must-read in that period, and what won it four Pulitzer Prizes, including one for the 1987 stock market crash and another for looking at the human downside of a Henry Kravis-led LBO -- two subjects on which Dealy would have us believe the Journal looked the other way. Barbarians at the Gate and Den of Thieves -- two quintessential Eighties exposes -- both sprang directly from Pearlstine's leadership. You could argue much more credibly that the Journal got carried away with its prosecutorial persona and ignored some of the less sensational but more significant stories of the era -- the incredible implications of the personal computer and the restructuring of corporate America, to name two. Far from being too soft, the Journal was probably overzealous to the point of , unfairness at times. But it was not corrupt. When corruption did appear -- reporter Foster Winans was convicted of peddling inside information for personal gain -- the Journal struck swiftly to punish. Yet, incredibly, Dealy all but sides with Winans, implying that the Journal pursued him so vigorously because he is a homosexual. Dealy presents himself as some significant Dow Jones insider, clearing his conscience at last with this breathless tell-all. He did have personal access to Kann -- on the tennis court -- which the CEO no doubt now regrets. But at best he was a fleeting, peripheral character within the corporation. One can only speculate as to why Dealy chose to turn a sound idea for a book into such a shabby polemic, or why his publisher, Birch Lane Press, is sending out -- as part of its promotional campaign -- letters attacking the book's credibility. My guess is this: The publisher craves notoriety; the author did it for the money.

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EXCERPT: ''The Journal has been too busy pandering to hostile takeover artists to reveal the excesses of the last decade.''