Apropos the Elena Kagan pic on page one yesterday. (And apropos anything that comes out of that rag since Murdoch swiped it up.) Read the columns at the end of the article as well to get a taste of how this charge sits with right-wingers:
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/wsj_kagan_softball_trust.php?page=allThe real issue in the Kagan softball dustup: The paper has lost credibility in the Murdoch era
By Ryan Chittum
“As News Corp. has consolidated its control of the paper they have increasingly come to demand enterprise journalism that serves the interest and viewpoints of the News Corp. management,” Glenn Simpson said. “The upper ranks are now dominated by conservative and partisan editors who aren’t shy about making their views known.”
Simpson is the respected former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, and that quote is from former WSJer Sarah Ellison’s new book War at The Wall Street Journal, which is recently out (and which you should go buy!).
We’ll have more on that later, but I bring this up in the context of a bit of a stir the paper created yesterday with its large front-page photo of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan playing softball. You don’t have to be a cynic to think that the Journal chose the two-decade-old picture to imply Kagan is a lesbian.
My wife, hardly a media critic, mentioned it to me unprompted yesterday as she looked at the front page. She was stunned that a paper would do something so obvious and ham-fisted.
Journal editors profess shock that anyone is drawing inferences from the picture. Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray, a holdover from the Bancroft era, it should be noted, was incredulous on Twitter, responding to a Fast Company editor’s question about what the paper was trying to suggest:
That she played softball?
And Murray told Politico’s Ben Smith “I think your question is absurd.”
It isn’t, of course. First of all, for the old Journal it would be (then again, that Journal would have run a small dot-sketch of her face). Photos are powerful and suggestive precisely because they are wordless. If the Journal is surprised by this, that’s already a problem.
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