This a great piece on how Rupert Murdoch has in a single year made the WSJ news pages questionable. I am shocked! Shocked I tell you:
"Not long ago, a British conservative columnist and Weekly Standard contributor who once wrote a column asking if America was ready for a “dangerous left-winger” like Barack Obama would have been an unlikely second-in-command at The Wall Street Journal.
While the Journal’s editorial page has had a long tradition of outspokenly conservative commentary, the news sections have had an equally strong tradition of nonpartisanship. But when Gerald Baker was named the paper’s deputy editor-in-chief, critics cited the appointment as evidence that, under Rupert Murdoch, the walls between the two would be coming down.
Baker, 47, a longtime reporter and columnist in Washington for the Financial Times and The Times of London, has been at the Journal for almost a year, and the accusations that the paper’s coverage of the Obama administration has started to slant to the right have only become more pointed.
Baker, seen by Murdoch critics as responsible for a more partisan tone in Washington even more than the paper’s editor-in-chief, Robert Thomson, dismisses the criticism and says those who make it have no understanding of his long career in journalism."
Oh really?
One Journal staffer described Baker’s first impression in the newsroom — by way of YouTube — as “totally obnoxious, puerile, anti-intellectual, useless drivel.” A journalist who’s known Baker for years said he was “quite taken aback” by the Hannity clip, and while acknowledging that Baker leans right, argued that “he’s not as hard-line as he’s being portrayed.”
I love the irony. For all of the right-wing patriotism talking points, they take no issue with a foreign national controlling the level of truthiness they get int their news.
