Why Quote From the Wall Street Journal?

                                             

            Since I have identified myself as a liberal, it may surprise you to see occasional quotes from The Wall Street Journal.  But there’s a good reason why I do this.  When I was in college (in the late Pleistocene) I was told that though WSJ was known for outrageously ultra-conservative rants on their editorial page, their news pages were accurate and reliable. But for many years, I found their editorial page so offensive that I could hardly hold my nose long enough to pick up a copy.

            Then several years back, a friend of mine changed my mind. This friend, a successful middle-management technocrat center-right moderate whom I had known from childhood, made an interesting point:  His said that many people he knows who read the Journal do not agree with any of their editorial positions, or perhaps just find them amusing.   But they subscribe anyway because within the news pages they find excellent investigative pieces—often stories covered nowhere else. He also pointed out that at The Journal, they do an good job of keeping their fact pages separated from their opinions.  (I remarked at how appropriate this was, since they usually manage to keep their opinions widely separated from any facts.)  

            I conceded that all this might be a good reason for reading WSJ, but I now have an even better reason.   Whenever I argue politics, (generally relegated to days of the week ending in “y”) I am arguing either with other liberals, (preaching to the choir) or with conservatives.  In Iowa, you can find both.  When I’m preaching to the choir, if I quote from Nation, The American Prospect, or some other liberal journal, they’ve already seen it.  They’re reading what I’m reading.  But few of them would ever read WSJ.  So if I discover some little statistical factoid in WSJ that neatly proves a liberal viewpoint, but which was never printed anywhere else, then when I make my liberal friends aware of it, I’m providing something they would not otherwise discover.

            Even better would be dangling such a factoid in front of a conservative, without identifying the source. Predictably, they begin by complaining about “liberal media bias,” saying something like, “So where did you get that story?  What ultra-liberal commie pinko rag prints that nonsense?”  And I reply, “The Wall Street Journal.”  The cognitive dissonance is wonderful. I have quoted to them from their own Bible.  It’s the rhetorical equivalent of a hand-grenade.