The Wall Street Journal was once one of the most respected newspapers in U.S.A. Then it was sold to a right-wing crook. Today I stumbled upon:
Stephens: The President of Contempt - WSJ :
(This is from the “on-line” Journal, perhaps the print edition is less egregious.)
I hope regular WSJ readers will give us a feel for how much the WSJ has changed.
The shift on their editorial pages was obvious and blatant from the moment the sale went through. That’s why we no longer regard them as a “relatively unbiased” source for my debate team.
See, i’ve never considered them a “relatively unbiased” source in terms of their op-ed pages. For a long time, the WSJ has filled its op-ed pages with a parade of incredibly conservative commentators, people who are happy to trumpet their ideology and happy to rag on left/liberal ideas and policies at every opportunity.
But all of this existed quite comfortably alongside one of the best teams of reporters in the news business. No matter how much the op-ed pages descended into spittle-flecked conservative ranting, the news pages of the paper were usually filled with accurate, well-researched, and well-written stories.
Even radical leftist critic of the American mainstream media Noam Chomsky argued on more than one occasion that the big-time business press like the WSJ and the Financial Times (UK) is the best place to get your news, because powerful people read those papers and they don’t want to be lied or pandered to.
The real question, it seems to me, is not whether the editorial views of the Journal have changed, but whether those views have affected the day-to-day reporting in the paper. The story linked by the OP is clearly and explicitly an opinion piece, and is pretty much irrelevant to that question.
The WSJ editorial pages have been rightwing boilerplate since as long as I’ve been literate. Their reporting was well regarded, though, and I think thats what people were afraid would change when Murdock took over.
OK, i can’t stand the guy, but this always bugs the hell out of me so i have to correct it:
Rupert Murdoch
with an “h” at the end.
Thanks. 
OK, It’s Robert Murdoch. We heard you already!
The name The Wall Street Journal used to carry a considerable gravitas, but the quoted piece is of a quality beneath the standards of the New York Post.
It is like Erin Burnett getting a show on CNN. She was deep into wall street with her time on CNBC. She will slant the way of the powerful.
The Journal still had a great Friday crossword though.
Perhaps, but isn’t its overall value buoyed by the quality of such sage insights as follows?
Just to pull three random examples from one of the 21 pages of user commentary.
Murdoch. Rhymes with Moloch. You’re welcome.
Seriously, you’re picking on the comment thread? Newspaper comment threads are generated automatically by the same AIs, developed specifically for stupidity, that generate Yahoo Answers.
Yea, I think the whole internet reached a consensus not to pick on opposing sides comment threads when debating sometime around 2007. Its just too easy, and basically doesn’t prove much except that John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory holds for participants of every side of every argument.
The only things scarier than then the comments from either side in news sections are the comments in sports sections.
IMHO the WSJ editorial page is less transparently conservative than the NYT Week in Review is transparently liberal. And the WSJ news sections aren’t biased at all IMHO, whereas the NYT spreads its blatant liberal bias throughout every section (the Sunday magazine even has liberal recipes for godsakes).
Do they waffle on the issues?
Is that a Watchmen reference? Cause if it is that’s a deep track.
Silly dude. Just silly.
Not intended that way, but I guess the Baal’s in your court…
I love a good False Equivalence. :rolleyes:
The WSJ reporting still seems good from a standpoint of comprehensiveness and fairness. The editorials and op-ed have been crankily right-wing for as long as I’ve regularly read it (the past half-dozen years or so*), though they do occasionally print columns diametrically opposed to their stock views.
Beyond the usual Obama-is-sleazy/doomed from the likes of Karl Rove, gripes about anyone who proposes cracking down on business excesses and crimes (they were practically dancing in the streets when Eliot Spitzer had his little hooker problem) and harangues about regulation, what really pisses me off about their editorials and op-ed stance is their anti-FDA/anything goes position regarding drug and medical device marketing. Whenever a drug (i.e. Avastin) isn’t approved for treating a particular disease, you’d think we were living in the gulag. Hey fellas, “health freedom” doesn’t mean “let 'em sell and market anything they want and your insurance has to pay for it”.
No, but they have plenty of company, including the New York Times (which has gone way downhill in terms of partisan ranting in the last few years).
*it was years before the Murdoch sale that the WSJ printed that classic editorial about “lucky duckies” whose income was so low that they didn’t have to pay federal taxes.