WSJ… Free Expression? Not So Much

I switched on my cell phone this morning and turned as usual to the Wall Street Journal. This is despite being aware of a growing feeling of betrayal by my erstwhile favorite newspaper.

My eye immediately fell on an incongruous sight. It was the story of the Delta plane which upon landing at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, in what is referred to as a “single-aircraft accident,” flipped over and landed on its back.

Before I started to read the piece, my attention was diverted by the advertisement video that sat at the top of the story. It featured a row of three happy smiling people sitting comfortably side by side on…an aircraft (right way up).

I thought to myself (ignoring the ridiculous inappropriateness of the juxtaposition) that this was a perfect metaphor for what has been happening at this still great newspaper; too little attention to detail and insensitivity to its readers and of course, the 80 passengers and their families.

Another WSJ favorite of mine is the weekly podcast by its Editor-at-Large, Gerry Baker. His weekly column is called Free Expression and he hosts the similarly titled WSJ weekly Opinion podcast, Free Expression.

There is an irony that a newspaper which has traditionally upheld the concept, practice and concept of free expression, if reader’s comments are to be believed, is increasingly censoring and suppressing them.

I wasn’t aware of how unhappy the general readership is about this until I posted a comment last week which ran afoul of the paper’s censors or more likely, its censorship algorithm.

I wrote in response to a piece entitled, “Has Elon Musk Become Too Big to Tame?” There are several topics that the WSJ seems to be “ambiguous” about. One of those is Elon Musk and DOGE.

The writer of the piece, Tim Higgins, seemed to me to fit perfectly into the ambiguous category when it comes to Musk and DOGE especially when he wrote, “Musk posted on X this past week, one of many tweets about the government, including many that dealt with rooting out supposed “fraud.”

It was the word fraud which Mr. Higgins wrote in quotation marks that struck me as a give-away. So I wrote…

“You know, it’s interesting how writers leave fingerprints that prove bias in their writing. It is just such a pity that this paper is becoming so smudged recently, it’s getting hard to read the real story.”

Then I suggested that Mr. Higgins read his own newspaper. There he would have seen an editorial mocking the New York Times for suggesting that government fraud is a “lie” and quoting from the last administration’s estimates of fraud in Medicare, Medicaid and others that runs into billions of dollars.

My comment was instantly “Rejected.”

Now, given the WSJ’s fondness for using the phrase ‘free expression’, it was curious that it so easily suppresses it when its readers spot bias within the WSJ itself.

It seems to argue that its reporters are incapable of showing bias. If they do concede that possibility, they suppress their readers right to the free expression that allows them to point it out.

That leads me to another curious feature of the current WSJ and its shifting priorities and standpoints.

I don’t know if you have had to deal with schizophrenics? Professionally as a rabbi I sadly had to do so many times. The tragic sufferers of this condition often inhabit two simultaneous realities and identities inside the same mind.

My late wife and I once fostered a little boy who had been evacuated from his schizophrenic mother. She had an “alternative” family speaking to her that her son – her real son, wasn’t hers at all. Consequently, she treated him terribly. He had to be rescued and brought up by others.

The WSJ has recently become a bit like that. There are in fact two WSJs. There is the Gerry Baker Editorial Board WSJ. It largely retains the “right of center” tradition of the paper and upholds the highest journalistic standards.

Then there are the general reporters. They increasingly produce copy and news coverage which is so far removed from that standard, as to seem to be the work of an entirely different and “alternative” newspaper altogether.

Nowhere is this difference and “schizophrenia” more apparent than in its coverage of Israel and Hamas.

The editorial board is clear about the profoundly evil nature of Hamas and its Einsatzgruppen attack on October 7, 2023. By contrast, news reporters and their editors are perfectly happy to repeat Hamas Health Ministry figures without the slightest hint where the figures come from or that they are lies and raw propaganda.

That split personality is of course picked up by readers, many of whom write in large numbers when WSJ bias and falsehood becomes unbearable. What those large numbers actually are is unknown. Judging from the common practice of readers inserting symbols in words instead of comments to escape being detected and rejected, it is significant. WSJ readers, Jewish and non-Jewish, are having to come up with workarounds to have their criticisms heard.

You have to look on X and other platforms that the WSJ can’t control, to see just how many readers are unhappy or have had their free expression chained.

But it is not only individual readers who have noted the change in the WSJ. In August of last year Honest Reporting Magazine ran a feature entitled, “Skewed Stories: The Wall Street Journal’s Biased Coverage of the Israel Hamas War.” They too spotted the strangely schizophrenic nature of the Wall Street Journal and the difference between its opinion page and its news reporting.

The list of complaints against the paper’s reporting included, only supplying partial information, whitewashing Hamas, making misleading claims, omitting critical facts and more.

Then they exposed some of the WSJ’s contributor’s irrefutable bias. Palestinian Fatima AbdulKarim has posted about “Israel’s ethnic cleansing.” Abeer Ayyoub joyously celebrated the October 7 mini-Holocaust.

The change became undeniable with the arrival from the UK in 2023 of the new Editor-in-Chief, Emma Tucker. She was previously the Deputy Editor of the UK’s Times newspaper. Both papers are owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Intriguingly, the UK’s ultra-Left and deeply anti-Israel, Guardian newspaper (think of HuffPost and then multiply by infinity) wrote warmly of her more “Liberal” perspective than previous Times editors.

Tucker almost immediately embarked on a round of firings, cuts and restructuring. Critically, she also reduced the editorial supervision of news that appears in the paper.

The results are a WSJ that little resembles its pre-Tucker self. It’s one where free expression forces readers to go to X or other platforms to have their voices heard. It is also now a paper with two distinct and contradictory voices… especially when it comes to Jews and the State of Israel.