18 Feb 2014 7:22 am
WSJ Propaganda Vehicle Foxified
Rupert Murdoch has been busy sullying the Wall Street Journal news department's once impeccable reputation for objectivity. Murdoch made his buddy Robert Thomson the new WSJ editor and made Leslie Hinton the publisher who proceeded to "Fox-ify" the Journal as Joe Nocera described it in his blistering OpEd in the New York Times. Nocera describes the changes at the WSJ like this:
Rupert Murdoch has been busy sullying the Wall Street Journal news department's once impeccable reputation for objectivity. Murdoch made his buddy Robert Thomson the new WSJ editor and made Leslie Hinton the publisher who proceeded to "Fox-ify" the Journal as Joe Nocera described it in his blistering OpEd in the New York Times. Nocera describes the changes at the WSJ like this:
Nocera also writes about the softball interview the Journal editors conducted with Murdoch where the thorniest questions were not asked.
The Journal Becomes Fox-ified.
Within five months, Murdoch had fired the editor and installed his close friend Robert Thomson, fresh from a stint Fox-ifying The Times of London. The new publisher was Leslie Hinton, former boss of the division that published ’s British newspapers, including The News of the World. (He resigned on Friday.) Soon came the changes, swift and sure: shorter articles, less depth, an increased emphasis on politics and, weirdly, sometimes surprisingly unsophisticated coverage of business.
Along with the transformation of a great paper into a mediocre one came a change that was both more subtle and more insidious. The political articles grew more and more slanted toward the Republican party line. The Journal sometimes took to using the word “Democrat” as an adjective instead of a noun, a usage favored by the right wing. In her book, “War at The Wall Street Journal,” Sarah Ellison recounts how editors inserted the phrase “assault on business” in an article about corporate taxes under President Obama. The Journal was turned into a propaganda vehicle for its owner’s conservative views. That’s half the definition of Fox-ification
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/1 ... tive-views#On Friday, however, the coverage went all the way to craven. The paper published an interview with Murdoch that might as well have been dictated by the News Corporation public relations department.