uncommons

I’ve always had a special place in my journalistic heart for the Wall Street Journal as one of the best newspapers in the business for both financial matters and some fantastic features (yes, features!) that localize nicely into daily story ideas.

However, it stings knowing that Rupert Murdoch, new owner of the Journal, has went and as planned messed with a beautiful thing. I don’t curse the owners of Dow Jones for selling — that’s life and business — it’s the fact that the paper is now newscorp-ed up and, well, that’s never a good thing fox news. Read this Columbia Journalism Review Audit op-ed and get the salve out. Just a question — did anyone really think Murdoch was going to uphold his word? ppff.

And, see, newspaper readers are pretty stupid, we all know that. But even they will sense some disconnect when they see the newspaper holding leaders to account, matching what they say today against what they said in the past, sorting through spin and attempts to misrepresent the record—doing what newspapers do all day, every day—and the news organization misrepresenting the record, avoiding accountability for what it said in the past, doing the opposite of what it said it would do.

So, what I’m saying here is that l-y-i-n-g and j-o-u-r-n-a-l-i-s-m don’t go well together.