Atrios on the Wall Street Journal:
Regularly people are shocked to discover that the WSJ editorial page is as loony as Fox News....But they rarely take the next step and consider the likely consequences of that being pumped into the heads of the richest people in the country daily. There's this odd belief that those people must just read it for the news, that they are smart enough to chuckle at the opinion page.
The Journal's editorial page is, in some ways, loonier than Fox News. Fox is mostly about outrage, which means it's ideologically flexible at times. The Journal editorial page isn't. They have firm beliefs and always twist their words to fit them—somehow.
But they aren't stupid, as Fox News sometimes is. For the most part, they don't flatly lie or say transparently dumb things. Their pieces are subtler than that. They know that good propaganda is often more about what you don't say than what you do, which is what makes even smart people vulnerable to their deceptions. Their readers want to believe, of course, which makes them easy marks in the first place, and even diligent readers are seldom knowledgeable enough to realize what's being left out when they read a WSJ editorial or op-ed.¹
So it all gets gobbled up by people who might be smart enough to see through some of Fox's more transparent idiocy but aren't smart enough to know what the Journal editorial page isn't telling them. This has been their MO for more than five decades (ever since Robert Bartley took the helm in 1972) and it's never changed.
And why should it? It works great on their (very influential) audience. They have no idea they're being conned, so they'll lap it up forever.
¹For an excellent example of this, click here.
I disagree that the WSJ editorial page doesn't say transparently dumb things. They do, and often. Maybe not always as transparently dumb as Fox, or quite as often, but there really isn't that much daylight between the two. Maybe the WSJ uses longer words and sentences, to mimic what passes for erudition among the trust fund babies.
Ah, the George Will method.
I think this happened some time ago. I stopped reading WS when they seemed so right winged after the new owner took over. My very best friend continued to read and thought nothing of it but her liberal ideas became more and more like she was tuned into Faux and she was more of a Repulsive than Lib. This may happen to a whole lot more newspapers with "balanced" news becoming more unbalanced. I am seeing this a bit with NYT. They are winning....
Back in the day, 1980's to 2000 I used to get the black ink on paper version. I liked the business news pages and the letters to the editor. The letters would sometime poke the left side pages pronouncements as complete an. utter bullshit.
I got the cheap subscription because my late wife taught accounting. Now I just read Antifa, CRT Liebural and BLM blogs to get my news.
I used to be surprised when I would talk to people in finance -- mid-level folks at Goldman Sachs, for instance -- and find that their knowledge of certain things was simply incorrect. I remember talking to one friend about 2013 or so who insisted that the deficit under Obama was increasing at a fast pace.
Then I realized these folks were getting their information from the WSJ edit page.
non editorial content in WSJ was so good back in the day, I have no idea now, hopefully it is decent
tons of finance news is non actionable click bait , still, a shame it is a murdoch operation.
I noticed there is another crap right wing billionaire in France ruining a publication he bought too -- https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/business/jdd-france-newspaper-strike.html?unlocked_article_code=83ddEqDmJS2-dN9pudL81jZh6AIbE2yrhBr9xmXIzSDWaduSdHFJPXckS-v7Q07Cp66X8916yJM3siJfb9ulxEUx2P8mgbKzPR1WCq3hK55yjVrqDk_HV3WABQ6b9cxqzKqJFsE09gelkg2hlLai6HGUeGy3dUGOw0pOnsmNpaMGAByQLbgZZ2hhIflOl_k1ZftBz5QEiQi9gdgEu_wjihrn8_1rigit3d5aml4mUGzYF5OCobmy4iHBg0bqtK9l09tJzOjTemGhdPlWcElkdzoiiiPlg0giwj1SP4bXRsjRVwX1TKzsHYxJYbS7fFnpELYeM683V_yPB5586MDRjZ3orQwE2A&smid=url-share
billionaire bastards
On a recent flight out of Houston, the woman sitting next to me (who had a definite Texas accent) read, cover-to-cover, the entirety of that day's WSJ editorial pages. After that, she shifted, for the remainder of the flight, to reading the Bible.
I don't have anything in particular to say about this other than that there are a lot of very different people out there in this great country of ours, and the thought of even just a few of them devotedly reading the WJS eds makes me more than a bit uncomfortable.
I remember at the end of Clinton's second term when the WSJ editorial board published a bound complete collection of all its anti-Clinton editorials. Why they thought anyone would care I don't know, but within a year you could buy the unsold copies on eBay for a price corresponding to the recycling value of the paper. The invisible hand evidently did not share the WSJ editorial board's high opinion of the value of its writings.
Forgot all about that.
https://www.abebooks.com/9781881944027/Whitewater-Editorial-Pages-Wall-Street-1881944026/plp
Right wing fap book.
Great fucking jesus,
https://twitter.com/LaikenJordahl/status/1688976652234371072
Why isn't this attempted homicide?
It's an international border/waterway. No doubt the Justice Department will get on the case by the time of the second Harris Inauguration.
Or some US cattle will get hurt and there'll be hell to pay in Texas.
WSJ editorial pages are an offense to human decency and reason. Yet I cannot say that Thomas Friedman, David Brooks and Maureen Dowd are any more intelligent.
The NYT rots its readers brains, by claiming to be the adults in the room while eructing centrist equivocations which benefit Trump.
The NYT editorial page: Full of writers who were publicly overjoyed about the Iraq War and will never suffer a single consequence for it, who consistently draw false equivalences between Trump and Democrats - or between Trump and prosecutors, as if each side must always share half the blame - and who believe above all else that email security protocols are the bedrock of our republic.
They do not care if all cheerleaders become mommies, as long as federal email servers are provisioned according to policy.
The WSJ doesn't care how many 10-year-olds have babies, or how many women must risk their lives to carry doomed malformed fetuses, as long as the planet's climate is destroyed.
At least the WSJ editorial pages are transparently deranged. And at least the news side of the WSJ does not characterize Trump storing classified documents as a "dispute" with law enforcement.
To assume that the WSJ speaks for all Republicans (or Conservatives), just as Fox speaks for all Republicans (or Conservatives) is to make the mistake of assuming that everybody you don't like must be the same, simply because they're all labelled in the same way "enemy/Republican/Conservative" in your mind.
But reasoning based on labels is the reasoning of a child.
I fully expect to get the usual "shut up troll" comments that I get every time I raise this point, but for the 5% or so reading Kevin who are actually interested in understanding the world, here are two articles discussing aspects of how current Conservatives are, as always, diverse in their beliefs, and arguing over what's the appropriate way forward:
short, but covers only one issue
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/reform-conservatism-overlooks-cultural-stakes-current-political-divide/
long, but covers rather more territory
https://scholars-stage.org/further-notes-on-the-new-right/