Paul Krugman asks a very simple but heretofore unanswered question, "What is the true agenda of the WSJ?" It is easy to understand Fox or the New York Post, but the WSJ has always been a bit of a mystery.
This morning’s Wall Street Journal opinion section contains a lot of what one expects to see. There’s an opinion piece making a big fuss over the fake scandal at the EPA. There’s an editorial claiming that the latest job figures prove the failure of Obama’s economic plan — something I dealt with in the Times. All of this follows on yesterday’s editorial asserting that the Minnesota senatorial election was stolen.
All of this is par for the course; the WSJ editorial page has been like this for 35 years. Nonetheless, it got me wondering: what do these people really believe? I mean, they’re not stupid — life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they’re not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth — one that is, in effect, told only to Inner Party members, while the Outer Party makes do with prolefeed.
The question is, what is that higher truth? What do these people really believe in?
Brad DeLong posits an
answer from a conversation he overhead at lunch in DC a number of year's ago. Money quote:
the Journal editorial writers thought that their role was to make not the strongest but rather the most persuasive case for lower taxes and Republican candidates in every circumstance--that they had a duty not to inform their readers, not even to make the truest arguments for the side that they had been hired to support, but rather to make the arguments for the side they had been hired to support that would strengthen that side the most by convincing the most people.
