It's Safe To Give Journal Readers the Facts--They'll Vote Republican Anyway

The traditional gulf at The Wall Street Journal between their far-right-wing editorial columns and their down-the-middle--even occasionally liberal-tilting--news pages remains as wide as ever.

Yesterday's paper included a (rather boring) op-ed piece promoting personal Social Security accounts by John F. Cogan, a Hoover Institute fellow and a member of President Bush's hand-picked (not to say ideologically stacked) Social Security Commission. The same issue featured an analytic front-page story whose two-column headline read, "In Bush's 'Ownership Society,' Citizens Would Take More Risk; Beyond Social Security Moves, His Vision Encompasses Health Care and Housing; Shrinking the Safety Net." Most delicious quote--these two back-to-back grafs:

The president's philosophy reflects a libertarian, free-market bent common to Texas and its small-town Petroleum Clubs, made up of local business leaders. As far back as the young oilman's losing bid for Congress in 1978, Mr. Bush proposed carving private accounts from Social Security.

After his defeat, Mr. Bush went back to the oil business, and then became part-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. His own financial risks and business failures through the 1980s were cushioned by investors drawn from his family's circle.

Nicely done, no?--soberly worded and objective, but with a sting derived purely from juxtaposition of undoubted facts.

That's not all. The same issue of the Journal featured a column on the front page of the "Money & Investing" section that quietly but methodically disemboweled the logical contradictions underpinning the Bush administration's Social Security proposal. As summarized in the article's second paragraph, the president's plan "ignores an irrefutable rule of finance: There is no free lunch."

I've long speculated as to why the management of the Journal tolerates what it must view as the ideological waywardness of its reporting staff. I think the explanation is this: Readers of the Journal are largely business people (managers, entrepreneurs, and investors) who expect and demand objectivity when it comes to reporting on trends and ideas with economic or financial consequences. (Of course, that applies in spades to the overhauling of Social Security.) When it comes to information that might shift interest rates, bond valuations, or currency prices by a decimal point or two, the Journal rightly prides itself on high standards of factual accuracy. After all, we're talking about money here, something that most Journal readers consider more important than any political shibboleth--even one they happen to endorse.

And in any case, it's safe to reveal the truth, however ideologically incorrect, in the news columns of the Journal, since the vast majority of Americans have never looked at a copy of the paper and probably never will. It's a lot more worrisome to the right when a reporter at one of the TV networks strays from the path of politically-approved news. Too much of that, and voters might start pulling the wrong levers.