The Wall Street Journal: Progressive Rag?
The Journal’s publisher touts its nonpartisan reporting, but progressive opinion infects its news pages.
When Ronna McDaniel, former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, was fired within days of being hired by NBC, the Wall Street Journal reported the news on March 28, 2024, under the headline, “McDaniel’s Saga Shows Peril of Election Denialism.” Her dismissal, wrote John McCormick, “is a stark reminder of how election denialism remains a divisive and burdensome topic for the GOP.” That “weight,” he said, “is also on members of the media who try to present both sides.” McDaniel herself had shown how “tricky” the terrain is since she was “booted” by Donald Trump even after years of “kowtowing” to him. “Denialism,” “kowtowing”—that’s how a proper journalist covers “both sides.”
But since NBC bosses presumably knew McDaniel’s denialist record when they recruited her, the reason for the sudden cancelation remained oddly mysterious in McCormick’s article—until paragraph nine, when he finally referred to the “on-air mutiny” by NBC and MSNBC “talent,” framing it as “the latest example of how news networks wrestle with how or whether to represent the views of Trump’s base of supporters on the air.” In this case, the agonized wrestling took less than two days, but McCormick spared us the details of the mutiny, instead returning to the election “claims debunked.” In the same issue, a WSJ editorial framed the event rather differently, under the heading “NBC’s Ronna McDaniel Tantrum.” A later article in the Business section set readers straight on the actual partisan shenanigans at NBC. But no correction appeared in the news pages, whose editors presumably felt they had adequately covered “both sides”—the right, i.e., left, and the wrong, i.e., deplorable, side.
Not to be outdone by his colleague, on Monday, April 1, 2024, WSJ writer Tim Higgins published a lengthy piece on Elon Musk under the headline, “Does Musk’s Good Outweigh His Bad?” A joke, in honor of the date, perhaps? Alas, Higgins appeared dead serious. He began, “On any given day, Elon Musk might be the hero or the villain,” before expounding on the man’s “duality.” On one side, there was Neuralink’s recent successful brain implant, plus Tesla’s electric cars, plus SpaceX’s reusable rockets. Pretty “good.” But then Higgins’s tone changed. Musk’s style to “eschew consensus” might work in business, but “When it comes to social issues . . . consensus can be key.” “[C]hasing the most extreme ideas” can make him “polarizing.” He “seems out of touch, and, at time cruel, as he bullies people on his social media platform X.” His “extreme opinions,” declared Higgins, “have been on renewed display” with regard to illegal immigration, and his “bombast” concerned “experts,” while “being cheered on by dark parts of the internet.” Musk’s latest faux pas, averred Higgins, was disrespecting Baltimore’s “DEI mayor”—which made him end the week as “the villain.”
My own brief investigation in the following days showed the scale of Musk’s villainy on X: to a tweet on foreign-born population growth under Biden having reached 172K a month, Musk replied “This is crazy”; to a tweet suggesting that the number of voters registering without a photo ID is rising in key swing states, he responded “Extremely concerning”; and to top it off, he called the prosecution of Rebecca Lavrenz as a J6 insurrectionist “Not right.” Clearly, a bully who so blithely eschews progressive “consensus” on social issues and is so cruelly “out of touch” with correct opinion had to be called out by an enlightened WSJ reporter.
It’s now a thing for them. On April 6, for example, WSJ car reviewer Dan Neil described his sister’s existential challenge of buying a Tesla from “that man.” At kitchen tables, Neil said, people now have to weigh “Model 3’s remarkable value proposition against Elon’s latest reprehensible post.” Imagine having to drive a car made by someone who finds mass illegal immigration “crazy,” loose ID rules “concerning,” and heavy punishment for insurrectionist grandmothers “not right.” How much more “reprehensible” can it get?
So do implants and EVs and rockets outweigh “extreme” tweets? Having read Higgins, WSJ readers know the answer. But Neil’s headline might leave them a bit confused: “A Tesla Resilient Enough to Weather Elon’s Remarks.”
The Journal’s left skew is not new. In summer 2023, progressives were up in arms over the Supreme Court undoing affirmative action with its radical opinion that, in college admissions, equal ought to mean equal. They began to float ideas to rein in the intolerably conservative court, by expanding it or setting term limits. But as reporter Andrew Restuccia explained in an article on July 1, Joe Biden wasn’t “convinced”: as a “staunch institutionalist,” he resisted leftist calls for change. To a president who had been staunch mainly in pursuit of his own power and his family’s wealth, that might have seemed a nice compliment. Or perhaps the partisan praise subtly signaled that Biden fell short of progressive standards?
Regardless, in the following months, the staunch institutionalist worked hard to get around another upsetting SCOTUS decision that had invalidated his cancellation of student debt without authorization by Congress. In February 2024, he bragged about his maneuvers: “The Supreme Court blocked it, but that didn’t stop me.” In response, a Journal editorial commented: “worst of all is Mr. Biden’s blatant rejection of the law, even after the Supreme Court called him out.” But having seen Biden refute its ambiguous homage, the news side issued no mea culpa.
And so it goes.
On August 31, 2024, two WSJ reporters were needed to broadcast the news that Jeffrey Epstein had tried to tap into Trump’s circle during the 2016 presidential campaign, even scheduling lunches to which Trump backers were invited. Bad Epstein, bad Trump.
On September 15, 2023, a long article covered what it called Exxon’s climate “two-step,” highlighting nefarious corporate doings in special text boxes—“Exxon researchers met regularly about developments in climate science but continued to discuss doubts about the scientific consensus,” and in an email about an Arctic project an adviser had written that “we will need to push back hard—albeit in a nuanced way—against this notion that the whole area is ‘pristine.’” Like Musk, corporations should heed the “consensus.”
On October 17, 2023, a prominent (online) headline announced that “Israeli Airstrike on Gaza Hospital Kills More Than 50, Palestinian Officials Say,” before being changed to “Hamas War Intensifies: Strike Kills 500 in Gaza Hospital, Officials Report.” The published version cited “both sides,” including the claims of “militant” groups, but remained agnostic on “the source” of the explosion.
A November 6, 2023, article on the impact of the Gaza war on Arab-Israelis summarized relevant history as, “Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were driven from their homes during the war that erupted upon the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.” No word on how it “erupted.”
A January 3, 2024, feature on potentially swingable Saginaw County briefly cited a comment by a former Republican official that voters “don’t take kindly to nonsense,” but gave two paragraphs to a Democratic former basketball coach, quoted as saying that “Trump scares me” and that apathy means a vote for Trump. Apparently, the Journal’s intrepid reporters could find no Biden opponents who were equally scared of him.
Etcetera.
In his recent annual letter to readers, Wall Street Journal publisher Almar Latour celebrated its record of slaking subscribers’ “thirst” for “nonpartisan journalism.” Does he read his own paper?