But he said there is practically none, and he doesn't claim to have any. One would have thought you'd agree, John.
No, I thought, just to be serious for a moment, his rendition was both much too condescending and too simplistic. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are, in important respects, in different businesses. The WSJ is a financial paper with a good investigative journalism staff and one of the oddest, most narrow minded, editorial staffs on the planet. It's not, nor does it aspire to be, a national general newspaper. The problems it faces are simply different from those of the NYTimes.
As for the content, I thought he underplayed the ethical mandate to get the story right and overplayed the commentary role. It's a truism of our time that a journalist's politics appears in her/his stories, just as elements in her/his personal biography do. Bartley was offering that one up again. The struggle, which he doesn't appear to appreciate, is to not only get the story right but to frame it for multiple audiences, not simply financial audiences. If one of the great lessons of writing is to keep the audience in mind and you are writing for a major national newspaper like the Times, imagine the challenge of framing the story for those many and layered audiences. |
