Wall Street Journal: fair and balanced?

Few days ago, my good friend Srivathsan forwarded a link to a Wall Street Journal article to me on India's success with reducing rural poverty and contrasted it with China's approach. Though WSJ has won an impressive 33 Pulitzer prizes for excellence in reporting, it continues to hire editors and columnists, whose work can be explained in one word: shoddy. One-more word to describe WSJ: neo-conservative.

Via Wikipedia: Two summaries published in 1995 by the left leaning Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and in 1996 by the Columbia Journalism Review.^[23] repeatedly criticized the editorial page of the Journal for inaccuracy and dishonesty in the 1980s and 1990's. During the Reagan administration, the newspaper's editorial page was particularly influential as the leading voice for supply-side economics. Regarding issues of international politics and national security, the Journal editorial page is squarely in the neo-conservative camp, for example supporting the continued presence of U.S. troops in Iraq and the legitimacy of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. The Journal in recent years has strongly defended Lewis Libby, whom it portrays as the victim of a political witchhunt. The editorial page routinely publishes articles by scientists skeptical of the theory of global warming, including several influential essays by Richard Lindzen of MIT.

Although their reporting on the news is fairly impartial and even liberal, its editorial content is too conservative to easily tilt the balance towards the right. Another recent example is the public face of WSJ on TV: Peggy Noonan. Here are two statements she made recently.

On the release of Bush torture memos by the Obama administration, she said: "Sometimes in life you just want to keep walking", and, "Some of life has to be mysterious."

On SC Gov. Mark Sanford's hike to the Appalachian Trail and the revelation of the affair by the media: "Um..I must say I've been thinking about Clinton a lot and it seems to me that in the Clinton era, during that famous story, a new devilishness was unleashed, especially in the media where a new meanness took style."

I started with an idea of commenting on the WSJ article, but went on to write a lot about WSJ itself. I guess I will comment on the article in my next post. Keep waiting.