The WSJ has gotten much, much worse since it was purchased by the Murdoch empire a decade ago. Even their non-opinion stuff reads like a business tycoon's lens on Fox News. It is absolutely a mouthpiece in the alt-right Murdoch propaganda machine.
As a long time reader of the WSJ, it definitely has become a Fox-ish paper under Murdoch. What's tragic is that right now the investing public's need for objective, non-politicized, long-term financial information has never been higher, but now the primary journalist institution is no longer providing it.
The Wall Street Journal _used_ to be a good financial reporting paper. The editorial page has always been hard-right (varying between mercantilism to straight-up fascism depending on the era) but the general reporting was solid and you could depend on it to tell you the truth with as little spin as possible. This was very important when it was the primary source of business and financial news in the US. By the time Murdoch bought it things had started to slip a little because Bloomberg had eaten a large chunk of the 'deliver fact-based news I can use to make trading decisions' mandate and as you would expect, everything Murdoch touches turns to shit. The current WSJ is now basically a print version of Fox Business News and will never regain the trust and reputation it once commanded.
And therin lies the situation. WSJ is worth very little to the very many. I see it as just another editorialized website. Was it always that way? No. Paper editions of the wall street journal were very good, on occasion. Web editions in the new age of journalism, not even close. No where near worth even trying to go around their paywall.
It's really a shame that the WSJ has gone down the toilet since Murdoch bought it. I subscribed from college until its recent decline and modulo the hilariously biased opinion pieces ("we have both sides of the story: the right-wing opinion, and the far-right-wing opinion...") it was a good source of information about what was happening in the world because its subscribers had a vested interest in getting information about what was really happening: when real money is on the line you want a no-BS, no-spin view of the world because it can cost you dearly if your news source loses its way and tries to tell you what it thinks should be true rather than what it knows to be true. Since the journal joined Rupert's empire the story quality has declined, the headlines have become less informative and more sensationalistic (even in articles that are not page one stories), and its current trajectory seems to be aiming for crash-and-burn before the decade is out.
These days if you want good daily business reporting the Financial Times is really the only choice you have.
To be fair the WSJ has always had some pretty outlandish opinion pieces. The tradition was that these were separate to the news reporting and the news reporting was untouched by them. But now it's in Murdoch stable. Sad.
reply