FREE THE WALL STREET JOURNAL!….Brad DeLong takes on a patently misleading assertion from Allan Meltzer on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page on Friday. You can go read Brad’s specific comments for yourself, but here’s his conclusion:
When reading anything by Allan Meltzer–or, indeed, anybody who writes anything published on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the only rule to follow is “verify, and even then still don’t trust it.”
The Journal’s editorial page is by far the most damaging organ of conservative falsehoods in the country today. Here’s why:
-
It has a much larger circulation than, say, National Review or the Washington Times.
-
It is read by the absolute elite of the business community, the most powerful men and women in the country.
-
It is very sophisticated. Unless you know a lot about economic statistics and are pretty good at crunching numbers yourself, the Journal’s misrepresentations sound extremely convincing.
-
It is not available online to nonsubscribers. Thus, it is not generally available to the rough and tumble fact checking of the blogosphere.
Conservative bloggers are forever going on about the service to humanity they collectively do by fact checking the New York Times and its socialist brethren. In the spirit of fairness, therefore, I’d like to suggest that they start up a campaign to get the Journal to post its entire opinion page for everyone to see ? not just the occasional piece they publish on OpinionJournal. They can keep the news pages behind a subscription wall, but how about letting the world see and expose the absolute dreck that their editorial page publishes routinely?
The WSJ editorial page is extremely influential, but it rarely gets called to account. If they had the courage of their convictions, they’d open it up.
