Since he took over the Wall Street Journal in 2007, Rupert Murdoch has infused the previously respectable paper with his version of “fair and balanced” reporting. The Journal’s editorial page has long been home to a particularly unhinged brand of conservatism — Obama is not just a bad president, but a secularist who shows “contempt for the liberty of religions that believe in God” — but Murdoch’s arrival seems to have lowered the wall between opinion and news. It’s more than a little ironic, considering the indignant stance of the paper’s”Best of the Web” column, which runs weekdays in the Opinion section and takes mean-spirited delight in pointing out the ostensible liberal bias of the mainstream media. The column’s chief writer, James Taranto, sees communists — or at least left-wing conspiracies — behind every CNN headline or NYT punctuation mark. In a snark-filled roundup of the day’s “best” headlines, Taranto takes a Salon story about liberal support for drone attacks, titled “Repulsive Progressive Hypocrisy,” and files it under the category of “Longest Books Ever Written.” Oh, snap.
Taranto’s standard criticism of the Associated Press, that it injects opinion into its news stories, is as perfect a case of the pot calling the kettle black as you can imagine. Frankly, I have my own issues with the AP, but I suspect the reporter’s description of Charles Dickens as a “chronicler of a world of urban inequality that looks a lot like the one we live in today” was less a slam against capitalism than a typical AP attempt to connect to the reader and make the story relevant to an imagined midwestern, literature-challenged audience. The poor woman certainly doesn’t deserve the snide remark, “But if she wants to give voice to such opinions, why doesn’t she become a novelist or at least a columnist?” If the staff of the Journal took this suggestion to heart, there would suddenly be a whole fleet of novelists on the News Corp payroll. Strangely enough, the latest examples of of the Journal’s reporters editorializing in a straight news article don’t seem to have caught Taranto’s attention. They did catch mine, however, and here they are.
*****
Amid last week’s controversy over the Obama administration’s mandate that all employers — even religiously-affiliated charities and schools — cover contraception in their health plans, the Journal’s editorial page railed against the “assault on religion.” Another clever headline: “HHS tells religious believers to go to hell.” And while James Taranto may not see communists behind every bush, on Feb. 9, columnist Daniel Henninger compared the “Obamaites” to the Communist Party of Poland that Pope John Paul II fought against. As shrill and offensive as such rhetoric may be, it was hardly unusual. More distasteful, however, was the way in which the Journal allowed its hostility toward the contraception mandate to creep into its news coverage.
While other media outlets, even the arch-conservative Boston Herald, referred to the effected institutions as “religiously-affiliated” non-profits and universities, the Journal insisted on a different formulation. “Under the new policy,” the Journal stated, “religious employers opposed to most forms of birth control wouldn’t be required to directly pay for such coverage in their workers’ insurance policies.” Never mind that the mandate explicitly exempted truly religious organizations — churches — that catered only to co-religionists. The Journal was determined to imply that the Obama administration had crossed an even brighter line. The Washington Post stated plainly that “Churches have always been exempt from the mandate.” The Times wrote that, despite dissent in the White House over how to implement the rule, “All agreed early on that churches would be exempt. The question revolved around colleges, charities and other religiously affiliated institutions that employed people of different faiths.” Yet a Feb. 11 article in the Journal, “Obama Retreats on Contraception,” never includes that all-important caveat. It speaks only of “religious employers” and “religious organizations” without once noting that the organizations in question are not churches or temples but million-dollar hospital conglomerates and schools like Fordham and Loyola. Less religious institutions than medical and educational ones, neither Catholic hospitals nor Catholic colleges protest the rules they must follow to obtain their share of Medicare dollars and Pell grants.
If the Journal insists on dropping the “affiliated” qualifier for these organizations, it could at least have gone the route taken by the Los Angeles Times, which discussed “a new federal rule requiring religious institutions to include coverage of contraceptives in non-church employee health insurance plans.” That the majority of the Journal’s readers were already familiar with the controversy is beyond the point. A responsible journalist would include all the facts. It’s no different, really, than if the Journal had written, “President Obama is withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan,” yet failed to add, ” . . . by 2014.”
*****
Continuing the paper’s solicitousness toward religion, a Feb. 10 article about a school-prayer case in which two Texas students “sued to block religious displays at the school, including prayer at the graduation ceremony.” The judge ruled for the students, but after the decision was reversed on appeal, Newt Gingrich nevertheless singled out the judge for criticism. In a short article, the Journal paints the judge as thin-skinned, reporting that he used his order approving the settlement to respond to Gingrich:
San Antonio-based Judge Biery, appointed by President Bill Clinton, couldn’t resist a parting shot. To those who “demagogued this case for their own political goals: You should be ashamed of yourselves,” he wrote. Mr. Gingrich’s campaign didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The Journal treats Biery’s appointment by Clinton as further confirmation that the judge is an angry, raving liberal. A reader cannot be blamed for coming away from the article with a low opinion of Judge Biery, who seems to be overreacting. That perception might be challenged, however, if the paper had supplied the entire story. The AP reports what the Journal did not feel important enough to mention:
In a court filing laying out the settlement terms of the prayer case, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery wrote that he forgave Christians who “venomously and vomitously” threatened his assassination, he thanked the U.S. Marshals for providing him additional security and without singling anyone out by name, offered a self-deprecating nod to those wished him the worst.
“To those who have prayed for my death: Your prayers will someday be answered, as inevitably trumps probability,” Biery wrote.
So the fact that Biery received death threats did not merit the Journal’s attention? The AP also gives us Gingrich’s exact language, which the Journal describes merely as a “barb.” Gingrich called Biery a “dictatorial religious bigot,” while Rick Perry characterized the “reprehensible” decision as an “inappropriate federal encroachment into the lives of Americans.” Put in context, the judge’s response seems less a “parting shot” than a refusal to be intimidated by people who apparently do not grasp the meaning of the greatest commandment: Love thy neighbor as thyself.
*****
Like the rest of the conservative media universe, which has manufactured a scandal out the bankruptcy of solar energy company Solyndra, the Wall Street Journal never misses an opportunity to lambaste the Obama administration for its attempts to spur the alternative energy sector. (This, despite the deafening GOP silence that accompanied Dick Cheney’s secretive, policy-setting meetings with oil and gas executives. This, despite the billions in subsidies and sweetheart royalty deals lavished on established multinational giants like BP and Exxon.) Naturally, when the Energy Department issued a report on Feb. 10 recommending tighter oversight and tougher standards for the alternative energy loan guarantee program, the Journal homed in on the negatives. The headline, “Clean Energy Aid Racks Up Losses,” grossly distorted the thrust of the report. While the Energy Department audit estimated that the government could lose up to $3 billion on the program, it also noted, as the Times put it, that “in setting up the loan guarantee programs, Congress set aside $10 billion for potential losses.” The Journal never mentions that the purpose of the program was to provide funding for ventures too risky to attract private investment. The government stepped in to correct a failure of the private market, which weighs the high chance of failure but neglects to price in the potential for great — albeit distant — payoffs. In short, the program that funded Solyndra was expected to lose money; the hope was that, while some of the investments would fail, others would succeed.
You’d never know that by reading the Journal, however. It disregards the report’s conclusions and leads with the dollar signs: “The U.S. government could lose $2.7 billion as a result of the loans and loan guarantees it offered to clean-energy companies, according to a White House-commissioned study carried out in the wake of Solyndra LLC’s bankruptcy.” Not until the penultimate paragraph, after twelve paragraphs detailing Republican criticism and DOE shortcomings, does the Journal add blandly: “Mr. Chu said the report’s estimate of $2.7 billion in losses was lower than the Energy Department’s own projection of $2.9 billion.” Talk about burying the lede. I wonder if the Journal would headline an article “Man Loses $500,000,” yet inform the reader only in the second-to-last paragraph that, “Mr. Smith admitted that buying $500,000 worth of PowerBall tickets may not have been the safest way to earn money.”
. . . So Well Read. . . 