I Love the WSJ!

I just finished reading Glenn Beck’s Happy Warriors in the Wall Street Journal.  It was an editorial piece by James Freeman, the assistant editor of the Journal’s editorial page.  The piece reminded me of how much I love the WSJ.

Newspapers across the country are failing and being closed. Most of the newspapers that are staying open are doing so with many fewer staff and much smaller budgets.  Some people believe this is due to technological shifts: radio, television, and the Internet.  I do not believe that this is an accurate representation of these events.

I believe that American newspapers are failing because they have allowed the quality of their analysis fall to a level where it provided no value to their readers.  Most American newspapers have been staffed for the last thirty years by well-meaning and  highly educated idealists.  Unfortunately, the majority of these men and women are woefully ignorant and so brainwashed with liberal propaganda that they are simply unable to perform the critical thinking tasks necessary for conducting useful analysis.

These are the people you meet at social events who know nothing but talk about everything — these are the people you avoid at social events.  These are not the people whom you devote time to reading and these are certainly not the people whom you pay money to read.

If newspapers want to be relevant and valuable to their readers, they are going to have to recruit an entirely new class of writer.  They are going to have to recruit writers with the ability to perform quality analysis of important news events.  They are going to have to recruit writers whose opinions have clear grounding in fact.  They are going to have to recruit writers who earn the respect of readers — writers that customers want to read.

As far as I can see, the WSJ is the only American newspaper which is serious about doing that.