Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is an esteemed, respected newspaper (ha!) owned by the Dow Jones Corporation, which focuses on business and financial market news. The tone is dry and respectful, and they don't have a comics page (possibly because the op-eds are enough of a joke already).
| You gotta spin it to win it Media |
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| Stop the presses! |
| We want pictures of Spider-Man! |
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| Extra! Extra! |
v - t - e |
“”If I were to create a list of questions to ask potential managers of my money, one of them would be: “Do you read the WSJ OpEds?” If the answer were yes, I would not walk but run in the opposite direction. |
| —Barry Ritholtz[1] |
Anyone interested in economics has pretty much given up on WSJ. They used to have a decent mix of free and paid content, but now even the real-time economics blog is paid.
Decline
Since Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the WSJ in 2007, however, many to the left of wingnut have noticed its declining editorial standards:
- One example of them failing at basic statistics
- Another example of them being unable to fact-check [note 1]
- The middle class: where you earn a minimum $15,000 a month!
- In defense of — wait for it — land mines!
- Egypt needs a Pinochet!
- Dear Israel: Violate the Geneva Conventions!
- Something something Kristallnacht. What better way to celebrate your 125th anniversary than by raising Mike Godwin from the dead.
- And did we forget the global warming denialism?[3]
- Eric Metaxas wow his readers into an euphoric feeling of goddidit
- Transgenderism: a mental disorder. It goes without saying that Paul McHugh is not an authority on the subject of trans people and greatly misinterprets the study he quotes.
- Making Money is a Patriotic Act "The two of us are quite rich. We have earned more money than we could have imagined and more than we can spend on ourselves, our children and grandchildren. These days getting rich off a profitable business is regarded as almost sinister. But we have nothing to apologize for, and we don’t think the government should have more of our profits."
The pandering has (predictably) made the comments section hilariously wingnutty and should be avoided at all costs.
Actually, it's about ethics in trolling minorities
When the paper accused PewDiePie of promoting or normalizing Nazi rhetoric, they received backlash from much of the YouTube community. This included reactionaries longing for a comeback of Gamergate and also dickholes like misogynist Maddox, Libertarian Phillip de Franco, and alt-right pandering Ethan Klein. PewDiePie lost his Disney sponsorship (and his mind) as a result.
See also
- Investor's Business Daily, its nuttier younger brother.
- The editorial pages regularly feature Ben Steinery (often with columns by the man himself).
- Richard Lindzen is their go-to guy on climate issues, and most, if not every column on the issue either makes hay of warmists, or downplays it as "alarmism".[4][5][6]
External links
- Gawker.com: archive.is, web.archive.org — A tale of two newspapers.
Notes
- Having a noted medical non-expert (in fact, a noted "expert" at promoting medical woo) like Suzanne Somers write (badly) about the economics of the Affordable Care Act was part of a blatant appeal to celebrity the WSJ was trying in the early-mid 2010s, in a clear sign of a decline in its rigor. Around this time period, the WSJ drafted many famous entertainers (such as Pat Sajak
File:Wikipedia's W.svg and Morgan FairchildFile:Wikipedia's W.svg among others) to write on financial and political topics that they were way out of their depth on. Bizarrely, this was often done under the special report title "The Experts"[2]
References
- Art Laffer: Make Up Your Own Facts Here, Barry Ritholtz
- "A Celebrity Journal fiasco: Quack-loving Suzanne Somers, WSJ "expert" on health care by Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review, 2013 October 29
- Wall Street Journal Doubles Down on Global Warming Denial, Slate
- WSJ: Selectively pro-science, ThinkProgress
- Real Climate: WSJ vs. the Consensus of the Scientific Community, Lindzen: Point-by-point, WSJ Editorial Board: Head Still Buried in Sand, Global warming delusions at the WSJ, etc.