Most of the legacy media had a terrible left-wing bias my entire adult life, with one very prominent exception – the Wall Street Journal. Upon my graduation from college in the 1980s, I subscribed to the WSJ. It was not only a valuable resource on all matters related to business and economics, but it also reported politics and other news with a commitment to journalistic impartiality. And most importantly, its editorial page was an oasis of conservative thought.
As we rolled into the 21st Century, the journalistic controls lapsed, and the reporting started to mirror the left-wing propaganda you could find in the New York Times. When the Trump era rolled around, the editorial page announced its obsolescence by becoming an unhinged haven for NeverTrumpism. Whether it was shilling for overseas wars, or acting as a leading voice for the uniparty, every page of the WSJ was now aligned with the Washington morass.
When I canceled my Wall Street Journal subscription in 2016 it carried an emotional punch. It was like terminating a long-time friendship with a person who had once been so important in your life.
The substack of former commodities trader Jeffrey Carter (@pointsnfigures1 on Twitter) is a must read for me, as he is always informative and educational. Last month he wrote about his decision to cancel his Wall Street Journal subscription.
In his substack, Mr. Carter writes not only of the WSJ’s wokeness and anti-Trump bias…
I have been reading the WSJ daily since I entered college in 1980. That’s 45 years of reading one paper. The WSJ used to be very good. It still has some good writers. However, much of the paper has lost its objectivity. It’s either gone woke, or the Trump Derangement Syndrome of the writer is so bad it is impossible to get decent information.
…but also about how it is incapable of even engaging in traditional journalism on non-political subjects.
I don’t want to know the stuff about Palantir that I can find using a simple web search. I want to know why Palantir does what it does, what kind of people it hires, and what kind of corporate culture it has. I want insights I can’t get from numbers. The same goes for any other company.
Most disturbing, the Wall Street Journal has become a propaganda outfit staffed by politically indoctrinated zealots.
The younger writers weren’t taught journalism in Journalism School. They were taught indoctrination, which is how they write. They are also kind of dumb when it comes to understanding how businesses operate.
There was one other publication in the ‘80s and ‘90s that I valued as much as the Wall Street Journal, and my act of canceling that subscription also felt like breaking up with an old friend. That magazine was Forbes. Under editor James Michaels, its journalists could condense so much “what, why, and how” into less than 1,000 words, and it had a right-of-center leaning. I was such a fan that I supported Steve Forbes in the 1996 presidential primaries. After Mr. Michaels retired in 1999 and the magazine went primarily digital, it became an unfocused mess that leaned hard to the left.
Forbes is now dead to me, as is The Wall Street Journal. The digital publications now carrying their names are a disgrace to those once-great journalistic institutions.
[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]