The decline of the Wall Street Journal
A lament about the decline of the Wall Street Journal:
The politicalization of the WSJ has moved to a new and more risky phase. The paper is now in danger of being a money loser — not for its investors (tho that has already happened), but for those traders who read its content.
It used to be that articles on the Market or specific companies or various finance stories were objective and reliable and free from bias. Sure, you could always count on money losing, bat-shit crazy nonsense in the editorial pages, but that was a special area of sequestered partisans, who due to their insanity cared not a whit about how much capital their lunatic ravings lost their readers. (The list is long and varied, but the Boskin “Obama Crash” on March 6th is a good place to start; then read anything Don Luskin writes — he is a reliable contrary indicator).
I assumed the drunks on the OpEd page did not care about what they did to your portfolio if you drank their Kool-Aid. But they were easy to avoid –you simply avoided that page, or read it and laughed. Smart investors could easily say “Go sell crazy somewhere else –we ain’t buying.” That was possible because you knew that the business pages were sacrosanct, always run with a steel-eyed objectivity that professionals could rely upon.
That is no longer the case. The lunatics now run the asylum, and henceforth, I am moving the WSJ into the column of “Stuff to read, but not take very seriously.”
It is puzzling that there are so few good outlets for financial news. You would think that with so much money at stake, a lot of media outlets would cater to the demand, but the opposite seems to happen: with so much money at stake, the investing industry (mutual funds, day traders, the stock-issuing companies themselves) can not allow the truth to go un-managed. So most media outlets focused on investing get co-opted by the investing industry. The Wall Street Journal stood apart for a long while, notable for its objectivity. Now it is sunk, though for an unusual reason – its become co-opted by the most radical elements of the Conservative movement. Very sad to see.