Aaaayh!
I’ll be up front. I’m a big fan of Barry Ritholtz over at The Big Picture; we cite him regularly in both our wire column and here on this blog. When I was first trying to get more blog-sourced opinion on the wire, The Big Picture was a blog I leaned upon heavily, and his sharp, lucid opinions really helped cement for my editors the notion that there was intelligent material being produced in the blogosphere.
I’ve got nothing but love for you, Barry, and I hope this doesn’t affect our having a drink together some day. But you’re wrong about the Journal.
“It used to be that articles on the market or specific companies or various finance stories were objective and reliable and free from bias,” he writes in a post that absolutely takes the Journal out behind the woodshed and beats it with a 2×4. “That is no longer the case. The lunatics now run the asylum, and henceforth, I am moving the WSJ into the column of “Stuff to read, but not take very seriously.”
What cemented for Barry his notion that “ham-fisted politburo apparatchiks” are running the paper was the page one lead story, “New Bank Rules Sink Stocks.” Now, I will grant Barry one thing: the headline makes it seem like it’s a market story, when it’s actually a political story. Of course, the bank stocks certainly fell on the bank proposal, so you can even defend the headline.
“It doesn’t take much looking to see other, more plausible, less politically motivated explanations than the floated Volcker/Obama proposal,” Barry wrote. “The market’s biggest losers were not finance-related issues, but rather were commodity-related stocks.”
Barry, you’re absolutely right about that. There were other causes. And they were covered yesterday here, here and here (and how about here and here the day before,) in the Money & Investing section, where the market recaps are always found. All those stories mention China.
The front page is for the big story, and the big story yesterday, without a doubt, was the President’s proposal.
I can tell you, dear readers, there is not one single editor between me and this blog. My columns in the Journal get edited, of course, and are the better for it, but there is not a single editor, not of the William Strunk variety or the ham-fisted politburo apparatchik variety, who tells me what to write here or what to say. (To be clear, I do have one editor: me. My title is news editor, and I’m responsible for holding my stuff up to the same standards to which I hold everybody else’s copy.)
In my closing comment, for example, which is never meant to be a comprehensive piece but just a brief recap of the top story or stories, I focused solely on the bank proposal. China is an important story, to be sure, but yesterday, in this country, the biggest story came out of the White House, no matter your political persuasion (mine actually is quite the same as Barry’s) or editorial bent. So that’s what I wrote about.
Should I have mentioned China? Maybe (and I did elsewhere.) But I could’ve also mentioned the jobless claims, which took a big pratfall (which I also wrote about elsewhere,) or the fact that the market’s been primed for a selloff for weeks, if not months (which I also wrote about elsewhere.)
If you had to put one story at the top of the front page of the biggest newspaper in the nation yesterday, it was the story that the Journal editors put there.
Lehman
Raymond Haines
R. Brown
G. Alton
APB
Pat Shuff
mutant_dog
Michael Goodman
Jim Maul
Michael
January 22, 2010
I haven’t read the comments to which you refer, but I stop reading the Journal on a regular basis after being a very long time subscriber. The decision to publish pieces by Karl Rove and his ilk made me cancel. It is one thing to be conservative another to be a propaganda machine. But let me add that I read Market Talk daily and find it fair and very informative. Thank you.