Talk:The Wall Street Journal

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Contents 1 OpinionJournal 2 David Wessel 3 Unbiased 4 That period 5 Hitchens 6 Militant? 7 Liberal bias! 8 Libertarian? 9 News coverage 10 what is pro-business line on immigration? 11 Info on redesign 12 Restoring design change info 13 Ed. Position: Social issues 14 Good Article 15 GA Re-Review and In-line citations 16 Daily Cost 17 The "A-Hed" 18 Picture 19 Socialist reporters 20 "and other related things" 21 Jim Cramer's Wall Street Journal "Bozos"

[edit] OpinionJournal

Thames is correct is changing the title of "OpinionJournal" to "Editorial page" (though perhaps it would be better in the plural). The former term nowhere appears in the print version of the Journal; it's the title of a free online site featuring WSJ editorials, opinion pieces, and reviews, plus some hard-right commentary (notably "Best of the Web Today" by James Taranto) that doesn't appear in the print edition. --Cubdriver 22:02, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] David Wessel

His columns do not express politically liberal viewpoints, and are not on the WSJ Editorial page. The germane point is a contrast between the editorial pages of NYT and WSJ. User: Cubdriver's edit stating Wessel's inclusion in WSJ somehow makes it a publisher of liberal columnists is disingenuous, to say the least. I've removed it. Eleemosynary 03:28, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Unbiased

I don't want to get into put-it-in, take-it-out battle, but I object to the removal of the line "The reporting, however, is admirably unbiased."

The preceding sentence (which I wrote) declares that the editorial pages have a conservative slant, while the news pages in their analytic pieces tend toward the liberal mindset you'd expect to find in the New York Times or Washington Post. I'm thinking of such pieces as the ongoing series in mobility in American society, as well as the opinion pieces coming from the Washington bureau. But this is not true of what used to be called "hard news." Here, in my judgment, the WSJ is indeed "admirably unbiased."

Removing the sentence makes it seem as if the news pages overall presented information with a liberal flavor. That's not the case! --Cubdriver 20:15, 25 July 2005 (UTC)

I agree that the paper's news is presented, at least in the case of individual articles, in a nicely neutral way. BUT, "Admirably" is not an encyclopedic word. Neither is it NPOV.--Zaorish 19:24, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

The word "admirably" is no longer in the article - Trödel 18:38, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] That period

Could we please drop the reference to the full stop following the newspaper's name on the nameplate? (It appears on the masthead as well, but I don't think that's what was meant.) I suppose there is a less important fact about the newspaper, but I can't imagine what it could be. (The fact that the New England edition is printed in Chicopee MA, perhaps?) Cubdriver

[edit] Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is a 'more liberal' writer? More liberal that who? Ayn Rand and P. J. O'Rourke perhaps - but only just.

He's a self-diagnosed neo-con (see The Atlantic online archive) who regularly does battle with his former 'fellow travellers' of the UK left.

What are these two paragraphs apropos? Cubdriver

[edit] Militant?

As the French newspaper is currently being characterized as "militant" in its article I would like to know whether the Wall Street Journal's article on February 6, 2003, insulting French President Jaques Chirac as a "balding Joan of Arc in drag": "The Rat that Roared" Christopher Hitchens would qualify this newspaper as "militant" as well? Just a rhetorical question... Get-back-world-respect 15:12, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Why don't you address the problems in that article rather than trying to "balance" out other articles to compensate? -Joseph (Talk) 04:04, 2004 Oct 18 (UTC)

Hitchens's piece would have been an op-ed, not reporting--if it exists at all. The link leads to a blank page at another site, nothing to do with WSJ.. -- Cubdriver

It exists. I recall reading it. 171.159.64.10 22:42, 25 January 2006 (UTC) Bert

[edit] Liberal bias!

Here is a link to a summary of the report. [1] -- Judson 23:01, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Reads like arrant nonsense to me. A newspaper is judged "liberal" or "conservative" based on the number of times different political think-tanks are mentioned? Sure, that's an objective measurement, but to call it a measurement of media bias is preposterous. 121a0012 21:16, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

^{I sat an pin?} Description of editorial page now torturously reads: The position of the editorial opinion and op-ed sections is typically conservative (or "classically liberal" in that while it takes a conservative view of economic issues and a neoconservative view of foreign policy issues it nonetheless takes a very liberal view of social issues like immigration and gay marriage) I read the paper every day, and I assure you that it is nowhere as complicated as all that. Nor do I think it takes a very "liberal" view on gay marriage! As for immigration, of course it takes a very open (is it liberal?) view: a business newspaper naturally favors a free flow of workers across borders, just as it favors a free flow of goods. WSJ editors are intelligent, politically and socially conservative, and place a very high value on individual freedom. What's so complicated about that? I think it was a mistake to drag in the notion of classical liberal. --Cubdriver 11:02, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

Agreeing with Cubdriver. The WSJ take on immigration is close to the Presidents - it is not nativist but not especially liberal. As for a liberal position on gay marriage... I think this needs to be supported or removed. The op-ed articles regularly air debates amongst conservatives, but they should absolutely not be confused with the editorial board's position. Letting Andrew Sullivan make to case for gay marriage does not equal support. 171.159.64.10 22:42, 25 January 2006 (UTC) Bert

The study conducted showed bias innews stories, not opinion pieces! That point is further elaborated here, http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion_columnists/article/0,2777,DRMN_23972_4353049,00.html

[edit] Libertarian?

Is it incorrect to describe the WSJ as Liberterian (or classically liberal)? I think using the term 'conservative' or 'liberal', alone, is ambiguous, and will confuse many non-Americans and Americans alike. --70.16.236.48 05:35, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] News coverage

This paper is conservative, period. The news coverage is not "liberal."

I think the poster was insisting on "classical liberal" (i.e., Edmund Burke) or was conflating "liberal" and "libertarian". The change you made was fine by me, also a reader for many years. However, the Washington columns in my judgment do tend to the left of center, as do some of the news-section feature articles. --Cubdriver 14:09, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] what is pro-business line on immigration?

A recent change declares that the Journal editorial page takes a "pro-business" line on immigration. What exactly is that, and how does it differ from a "liberal" line on immigration? Is Emma Lazarus pro-business when she urges "Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" Is that pro-biz? It's exactly what the Journal espouses. --Cubdriver 21:20, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

No entirely but certainly in part. See, for example, the position of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which claims to represent 3 million U.S. businesses. Businesses generally favor immigration because it helps to keep wages down; there are many jobs, seasonal agricultural labor in particular, where non-permanent residents and “migrant workers” have a significant effect on the cost of labor. (Put bluntly, the jobs are so unpleasant and repetitive that few Americans would want them at twice the wage.) There is also substantial business support for the H-1B visa program, which allows highly-skilled foreign workers (many educated at U.S. universities) to work in the country for five years in technical positions such as I.T. where there is currently a shortage of domestic workers. Labor organizations generally oppose both sorts of programs, for the many of the same reasons that businesses support them. 121a0012 02:52, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

One of the other arguments, from macroeconomic principles, has to do with the ability of the economy to sustain long-term growth. Many people believe that, in order to continue growing its economy, the U.S. must continue growing its labor force—particularly as members of the baby boom generation reach retirement and start to spend down their life savings. The birth rate of the native-born population is now below replacement, so the only place this labor-force growth can come from, absent a sudden increase in fertility, is immigration. Businesses generally favor economic growth, particularly in the financial-services industry which still makes up a large part of the WSJ subscriber base. 121a0012 02:59, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Info on redesign

When did the WSJ have the design refresh that also introduced color to the front page for the first time?

[edit] Restoring design change info

I don't understand why cubdriver (who seems to be frequent here) would delete the section on the redesign change. The move from 15 inches to 12 inches is a quantum change in the newspaper world and has spurred almost all large dailies to move toward the 12 inch format. That bit of a news which includes the citation is a lot more relevant to the article than a lot of the stream consciousness ramblings I see elsewhere in the article. Americasroof 22:31, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Check his Talk Page here [2]. It's very telling. He seems to regard Wikipedia as a fool's errand, and is reverting at will. If he does not respond on this page, I will regard his reversions and blanking as vandalism, and will revert accordingly. Eleemosynary 03:16, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. It's kinda scary to see somebody veer so far off the truth. The new 12 inch format is pretty close to the U.S. familiar letter size 8 1/2 inch x 11 inch landscape format. So the ultimate direction is the WSJ is going to be a tabloid!!! That's pretty big news for the most iconic newspaper design in America!!! I'm still working on how to word that news! -Americasroof 04:15, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ed. Position: Social issues

I added the Journal's opposition towards same-sex marriage. I think it's important for people to know. Responding to some dude above, though I too wish it were classically liberal like the Economist, the WSJ Ed. page is made up of (generally speaking) American conservatives.

I remembered that the Jernal also supported indefinite imprisonment of and/or torture of accused terrorists. Added that. If you want to change it, please discuss it HERE, FIRST, and don't just go and delete my stuff.

--User:Zaorish

How is their opposition to same-sex marriage relevant?

I read OpinionJournal.com regularly, and the Wall St. Journal editorial page occasionally, and this issue has never struck me as being one of their primary concerns.

Foisting amnesty on a reluctant public, editorializing against excessive spending by Congress and budgetary boondoggles like Medicare Part D, highlighting human rights abuses by regimes in Cuba, North Korea, and to a lesser extent, Venuzuela...

Thwarting the imposition of same-sex marriage is a tertiary issue for them, and that's being charitable.

In fact, most people would be hard-pressed to identify a populist or socially conservative stand that their editorial page is strongly identified with.

Paul Gigot, Dorothy Rabinowitz, John Fund, Tunku Varadarajan, Mary Anastasia O'Grady, none of these individuals are associated with the fight against litigation seeking the imposition of same-sex marriage.

It wasn't even a huge priority for Peggy Noonan, the last time I checked.

Ruthfulbarbarity 05:36, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Edit: In retrospect, I think I might have underplayed the role of Professor Mary Ann Glendon, who has written several op-eds supporting a Federal Marriage Amendment, or in opposition to the concept of judicially-imposed same-sex marriage.

Notwithstanding that fact, it still strikes me as a minor issue in the vast universe that is the Wall St. Journal editorial page.

Ruthfulbarbarity 05:45, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

It is misleading and unfair to assert that the WSJ supports the torture of "wartime combatants." First of all, that formulation includes all enemy combatants from any country, however civilised. Of course the WSJ would not support anything remotely like the torture of real soldiers from Britain or France or any other country. Second, the WSJ certainly did not support the Abu Ghraib incident, a case of real torture (although nothing compared with the beating and decapitation of civilian reporters by Muslim fanatics), nor any other case of clear-cut torture. The editorial page may support the use of interrogation techniques such as sleep deprivation, repeated questioning, and the cause of uninjurious discomfort to detained prisoners, but the status of these detainees is in question, and to represent the WSJ's position as a "justification of the use of torture against wartime enemies" is illogical and misleading. You added that the Journal supported torturing wartime enemies, yet you believe that it supports indefinite imprisonment/ torture of terrorists? These are not the same thing my friend. Soonersfan168 06:22, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Good Article

This article has been passed as a Good Article. I thought it was comprehensive, well-written, and well structured. I think that more citations in the history and editorial sections would do the article good (so keep that in mind :]), but I thought that it was sourced well enough to pass. Cheers! --Keitei (talk) 06:39, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] GA Re-Review and In-line citations

Note: This article has a small number of in-line citations for an article of its size and subject content. Currently it would not pass criteria 2b.
Members of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles are in the process of doing a re-review of current Good Article listings to ensure compliance with the standards of the Good Article Criteria. (Discussion of the changes and re-review can be found here). A significant change to the GA criteria is the mandatory use of some sort of in-line citation (In accordance to WP:CITE) to be used in order for an article to pass the verification and reference criteria. It is recommended that the article's editors take a look at the inclusion of in-line citations as well as how the article stacks up against the rest of the Good Article criteria. GA reviewers will give you at least a week's time from the date of this notice to work on the in-line citations before doing a full re-review and deciding if the article still merits being considered a Good Article or would need to be de-listed. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us on the Good Article project talk page or you may contact me personally. On behalf of the Good Articles Project, I want to thank you for all the time and effort that you have put into working on this article and improving the overall quality of the Wikipedia project. Agne 04:33, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Daily Cost

All the newspaper articles don't have what the price per issue is. How much does the WSJ cost per day? --70.111.218.254 02:59, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

A difficult question to answer. As I recall, the Journal's price varies from location to location. Here in New England, it's $1.00 per copy -- but that's a recent increase from (if memory serves) 75 cents. I seem to recall seeing the Journal sold for $1.00 in other parts of the country years ago. Does anyone have a list? Wiki Wistah 17:12, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The "A-Hed"

I was surprised to see nothing included about the A-Hed, the often quirky stories that are usually in column four on the front page. [3] [4] ^BlankVerse 09:44, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Picture

Update the picture, it has been reformatted.

[edit] Socialist reporters

It's important to distinguish clearly between the news sections and the editorial sections. Whether you call the news sections liberal or something else, they are completely different.

Here's an excerpt from an article by A. Kent MacDougall, who retired to teach journalism school, and famously wrote a few articles about how, as a socialist, he could write with complete freedom at the WSJ. This is from a source that has a strong POV antagonistic to socialism, but it's a (mostly) fair and accurate summary of the articles in Monthly Review, which I read but can't find on the Internet. If nobody has any objection, I'd like to mention this in the entry. More recently, the WSJ won many Pulitzer Prizes for stories that were similarly critical of the system, and I'd like to link to them to demonstrate what you can describe or not describe as liberal reporting. Nbauman 21:56, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

http://www.mrc.org/mediawatch/1989/watch19890101.asp

From the January 1989 MediaWatch

Reporter Admits He's A Marxist

"Eugene V. Debs may be my all-time favorite American and Karl Marx my all-time favorite journalist," former Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times reporter A. Kent MacDougall proclaimed recently. In November and December articles for the Monthly Review, "an independent socialist magazine," he explained that as a "closet socialist boring unobtrusively from within," he had little trouble promoting Marxist ideas in his news stories.

How did someone who also wrote articles for the American Socialist and communist Daily Worker manage this? MacDougall reasoned "that while newspaper owners and editors don't go out looking for stories that make the capitalist system look bad, the best don't flinch from running such stories if they meet mainstream journalistic standards for accuracy and objectivity."

During his days at the Journal from 1962 to 1972 MacDougal "took full advantage of the latitude Journal reporters have to pick their own feature story topics and report on them in depth." MacDougall proudly recalled how he "introduced readers to the ideas of radical historians, radical economists...in sympathetic page-one stories."

"I made sure to seek out experts whose opinions I knew in advance would support my thesis," he boasted, and "sought out mainstream authorities to confer recognition and respectability on radical views I sought to popularize."

In 1977 the Times hired MacDougall as a "special business correspondent" able to pick his own stories. "I lost no time making it obvious where my sympathies lay," MacDougall reported, noting that "of the first dozen stories I wrote for the Times, one profiled the leftist magazine Mother Jones and two others profiled Marxist economists."

In the early 1980's MacDougall got an opportunity to write a series that offered a Marxist explanation as to "why the United States is among the least equal of mature capitalist economies." Times editors nominated it for a Pulitzer Prize. MacDougall left the Times in 1987 to find a new vehicle for his views: "I picked up a pension (opposing the system is no reason to pass up an opportunity to make it work for one) and joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley" where "tenure gives me the luxury of coming out of the ideological closet at last."

Here's a better source: Confessions of A Closet Leftist, Time magazine, Monday, Feb. 06, 1989 By LAURENCE ZUCKERMAN [5]Nbauman 03:54, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

Here's another one: To March or Not to March Sunday, Jun. 24, 2001 By LAURENCE ZUCKERMAN [6]

An equally troubling -- and more elusive -- issue is whether journalists can cover stories in which they begin with strong personal convictions. A. Kent MacDougall, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, marched against the Viet Nam War while working on the staff of the Wall Street Journal. Defending his activities in a 1970 Journal op-ed piece, MacDougall wrote, "A well-trained reporter with pride in his craft won't allow his beliefs to distort his stories, any more than a Republican surgeon will botch an appendectomy on a Democrat."

Nbauman 04:00, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "and other related things"

What does this mean? --Gbleem 16:04, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

It's meaningless padding. You can have the pleasure of deleting it. Nbauman 19:13, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Jim Cramer's Wall Street Journal "Bozos"

Anyone care for a "controversy" section in this advert of an entry? This is pretty heavy stuff:

"You have to use these guys," said Cramer, whose track record managing $450 million at his hedge fund Cramer  :Berkowitz was a robust 24 percent average annual return.

Shortly after mentioning Pisani, he also discussed giving information to "the bozo reporter from The Wall Street :Journal" to get an article published.

from http://www.nypost.com/seven/03212007/business/cramers_big_mouth_business_roddy_boyd.htm