For reporting that is an embarrassment to the profession
of journalism, and for being beholden to corporate paymasters rather than
the citizens of America.
You wouldn't expect that Rupert Murdoch taking over the
ownership of the Wall Street Journal would improve the quality of its editorial
board -- and you'd be right.
BuzzFlash recalls reading a book by Eric Alterman in which he detailed the
journalistic sins of the right-wing media. One of the points that he documented
was that the editorials of the WSJ were written, at times, with accusations
that were contradicted by facts provided in the news stories contained within
the newspaper. In short, to support its radical political agenda, the WSJ
editorial board not infrequently engages in fiction writing rather than journalism.
Steve of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, nominated the WSJ editorial page "For
its bald-faced lies regarding existing law, over-the-top partisanship, and
frankly, fascist leanings in the matter of retroactive immunity for the telecoms.
Please see Glenn
Greenwald's article regarding this topic:
Indeed, Greenwald, of whom BuzzFlash is a great fan, noted:
There are very few opinion venues -- if there are any -- more
brazenly fact-free than the Editorial Page of the Wall St. Journal. They
have an Editorial
this morning warning of all the grave dangers posed by efforts from the "anti-antiterror
left" to limit the Leader's warrantless eavesdropping powers -- the
most dangerous of which, they warn, is the campaign "to deny legal
immunity to telephone companies that cooperated with the government on
these wiretaps
after 9/11." The Editorial is filled with one demonstrable factual
falsehood after the next.
Just marvel at this paragraph, incoherent and false in equal parts:
"By far the worst threat is an amendment from Senator Chris Dodd (D., Conn.)
to deny legal immunity to telephone companies that cooperated with the
government on these wiretaps after 9/11. The companies face multiple lawsuits,
so a
denial of even retrospective immunity would certainly lead to less such
cooperation in the future.
This is precisely the goal of the left, which has failed to get Congress
to ban such wiretaps directly but wants to use lawsuits to do so via the
backdoor."
The assertion that Congress has failed "to ban such wiretaps directly" is
an absolute lie and there is no other way to phrase that. The reason there
are lawsuits brought against telecoms isn't because of some cliched liberal-judicial-activist
effort to impose on telecoms obligations which don't exist in law. The
opposite is true: the lawsuits were brought precisely because telecoms
violated multiple
clear, long-standing laws that make it illegal to do exactly what they
did: namely, allow government spying on Americans and access to their customer
data without judicial warrants.
The irony is that the journalists who work on news stories for the WSJ have
generally been known for their strong reporting skills. But the editorial
board is widely recognized as a hotbed of ideological zealots, the right-wing
version of what you would have found among the old Pravda editorial board.
We recall during the Whitewater and Bill Clinton years, the WSJ editorial
board used to be a megaphone for the Ken Starr inquisition. We imagined that
the writers on the editorial page were walking around with tin foil hats
and antennas receiving messages from Starr, Reverend Moon, Jesse Helms, and
Richard Mellon Scaife.
We imagine that Murdoch will be pleased to continue the long tradition of
WSJ editorial fabulism in the service of extremism, but we will be on the
lookout for his replacing seasoned journalists who cover news with hacks
from the New York Post and other Murdoch tabloids.
For the moment, however, he must be pleasantly pleased at the continued fiction
writing skills of his recently acquired WSJ editorial scribes. When it comes
to rendering services above and beyond the call of truth to America's plutocrats,
they rarely, if ever, fail to disappoint.
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