WSJ Op-Eds constantly make fallacious arguments in the service of big business and Wall Street.

WSJ leans whatever way News Corp wants post 2007 acquisition.

Also of note, NewsCorp sends lawyers and strategists to every ICANN meeting, and has since at least 2010, if not before.

Possibly because they used to own MySpace and got in the habit?

Really? that’s shocking. Do you have any sources you can share that confirm this?

I think there are maybe attendance lists for some of the sub meetings?

As to myself, I have first hand knowledge they were there; I talked to some of them face to face at some of the ICANN meetings. Anyone can attend most ICANN meetings, they are open and public.

WSJ editorial board carried water for the ridiculous Bush government before that. It's been the print equivalent to Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity for quite some time.

It was easily always the worst part about the WSJ.

All sides of mainstream media are worthless in my book. Mainstream media is a net negative on society, and it's especially shown now with media trust at record lows.

This isn't just one company or one side of partisan MSM. NYT lied about WMDs in Iraq repeatedly, WaPo lied about a Russian hack of critical US power infrastructure and CNN struggles to tell the truth when telling you the time of day.

What is “mainstream media”? Media that doesn’t fit your biases? Because I constantly hear this “mainstream media” trope from conservatives, but it is only applied to liberal news sources, never RT, Fox, Breitbart, etc.

I’d assume newspapers, radio, and cable—the media with social currency in american society. There is certainly no shortage of criticism to be had from the left, either, so this attitude that “there is only conservative bias in mainstream media” is a little head scratching to me when ever I hear it.

Fox, Breitbart, CNN, MSNBC, New York Times, Washington Post. All of them.

Which of the names that I've just mentioned hasn't made huge, glaring journalistic errors repeatedly?

Even throw in the self-described 'neutral' outlets like NPR, Associated Press and others and you see the same thing. Repeated lies, walkbacks and egregious errors.

I don't know why any person would apologize for corporate media.

You make it sound like you expect people to be infallible.

Not at all, but the nature of mistakes is revealing of the journalistic bias of those working for those organizations.

When Washington Post falsely claims the Russians hacked into critical US energy infrastructure, this isn't a harmless typo or a flubbed detail.

When the New York Times repeatedly lies about WMDs in Iraq and tens of thousands of people die, this isn't a harmless typo or a flubbed detail.

Those are the obvious ones, the most egregious behavior is what they don't report on or cover up.

If the internet wasn't around to fact check the lies of mainstream media in real-time, imagine what they'd be getting away with.

Why do you think they're deserving of your defense? Their actions are neither harmless nor accidental. These aren't innocent mistakes.

These are recent examples. If you go back further, the same news outlets were repeating CIA propaganda via Operation Mockingbird and other efforts.

All news organizations lie and mislead. This is because all people lie or mislead or misrepresent or exaggerate or fuck up or whathaveyou. I contend that it's not enough to merely establish that certain news organizations have lied, or misled, or made mistakes, or colluded in the past to wholesale reject information from these news sources. Rather it needs to be established that they are flawed at an extraordinary degree relative to other organizations (though I concede that this is far-far-far-far-far easier said than done).

> If the internet wasn't around to fact check the lies of mainstream media in real-time, imagine what they'd be getting away with.

Wasn't there a phrase, "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet"? What if you listen to fact-checkers who themselves cherry-pick and distort? How would you know?

With all that said, there are serious flaws with how news is distributed which can make these human characteristics more pronounced (and I suspect our opinions of the so-called "mainstream media" are actually more similar than they are different), and that we generally ought to use the news to point us toward actual primary sources we can review for ourselves, rather than use the news as a source of anger-pornography (which gets tons of clicks) to bolster our misguided opinions.

As a consumer of sources of information, I'm just trying to make decisions based upon a tiny fraction of an extremely limited amount of information we know about the world around us (which I'd argue the vast majority of what we read isn't particularly helpful).

So what I'm getting at is that I feel that your tone is far too generalized to really be meaningful in any sense.

(I apologize if that sounds harsh)

Speaking at a personal level, if you consume news media you're more likely to be depressed. For this reason alone you shouldn't read the news. After all, do you really need to know about every single legislative and political minutiae that's the flavor of the day?

The rest of planet agrees with me. News media is very untrusted (last I read it's somewhere around 60% untrustworthy), and the industry is rapidly dying.

Faced with impending doom, the journalists at the helm of those corporate monstrosities sought to double down on lies and clickbait. Open up the Network tab on any news website these days and you'll see all the tracking and advertising garbage they've resorted to as well.

By reading news, you're supporting this behavior and also (statistically speaking) doing yourself harm in the process.

I disagree that one should avoid any source of depression. In some instances, relevant bad-news which is also truthful ought not be avoided simply because it may exacerbate depression. The hard part, of course, is discerning what is relevant.

Of course it's unhealthy to consume an unhealthy amount of worthless news, but that's tautological.

I'll also note that 60% of the planet is not "the rest of the planet", and I'd bet that a large chunk of the 60% you reference merely believe that their "news sources" (I'm using this term very loosely here, such as sketchy blog posts, so-called alt-news sources, and 4-chan memes) are more reliable than the news sources they don't like. Similar to how, say... the body of Congress is the least popular branch of the U.S. government year after year, yet people reelect their Congressperson year after year because they don't necessarily hold the same opinion of their Congressperson. It's hard for me to really tease anything meaningful out of your second paragraph.

The journalism industry is not "rapidly dying", it's rapidly changing, as with most industries over the past few decades. Unfortunately it's going down the path of shitty clickbait, but shitty clickbait isn't exclusive to the mainstream media.

I believe the real tragedy isn't the existence/worsening of so-called mainstream media, but rather the growing focus on national/international news at the expense of strong impactful local journalism.

I'm curious to hear about your solutions to these problems, as well as where you go to get informed.

We are not talking about fallible human beings when news coverage follows the same patter of the companies massive political campaign contributions. When media companies give away millions in order to influence the political environment, they loose the plausible deniability of being a political neutral entity which just happened to create news that follows a specific political direction.

There exist study (I would guess multiple) on the media landscape and which news company leans where and how. Some media companies are explicitly leaning in one direction, others less so. Some claim neutrality, and the study do support the existence of a very small minority that seems to achieve it. It is a subject I would like to see a meta study on in order to get a good estimate on how small the narrow band are of news sources that supply political neutral news.

You're much more likely to find level-headed business-friendly arguments in the opinion pages of the Financial Times than the WSJ. After News Corp bought it, its editorial section has become raggy. It's sad, because their regular news section is generally high quality (but with the same statist, status-quoist POV that the NYT and Washington Post have.)

When the issue of removing price caps first came up, I talked to a journalist at the WSJ about covering it. This was before they were even approved. The journalist was shocked at how this was all happening and could continue to happen. The story was killed by the editors.

I can't read the WSJ article because paywall but there appears to be an effort pushing the narrative that ICANN has to remain independent. On CircleID there are 3 articles (and 1 comment reply 11 minutes after the article was published) by VeriSign affiliated/PIR affiliated folks. The comment is a reply to a former VeriSign lobbyist by active VeriSign lobbyist. I can't prove anything, but it's definitely suspicious that there seems to be a lot of VeriSign connected folks who were trying to stop this deal. Oversight is perhaps the biggest threat to their golden goose. I wrote about it here https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2020/05/01/reflecting-on-org-s...

The WSJ hiding behind the editorial board making an this exact argument seems suspect. Their coverage was non existent and became not great once they did write about it. There are actual investigative journalists covering the issue with thought and depth. Kieran McCarthy at The Register, Timothy Lee at Ars Technica and more recently David Kaut at The Capitol Forum.

Prepare for a lot more articles like this one though and think about who stands to gain the most from them. It's always about the money.

I dunno, I've found WSJ's reporting to be poor for years.

Their editorial page has always been a bit of a joke (or eccentric, depending on who you ask). Their political reporting has been pro-business (no surprise), though people often confuse pro-business with pro-market. Their business reporting is mostly top-notch as is their investigative work (it was a WSJ reporter who exposed Theranos, despite Rupert Murdoch having a hundred million invested in it).

The WSJ editorial team produces great, detailed, and often groundbreaking coverage of business topics.

The opinion section, by contrast, is batshit insane.

It’s an important distinction.

News Corp is very good at manipulating the line. WSJ is not the same as it used to be. It is not fair and balanced. You can still still influence by omitting and focusing on key areas of stories. This applies to all media and News Corp orgs especially.

Fair and balanced media is an unobtainable ideal and certainly doesn't exist among any corporate news rags.

If you're trusting any corporate media to tell you balanced truth they're either lying to you and you don't realize it, or they're lying by omission (very common in MSM).

Even the Associated Press has made some pretty egregious errors triggering retractions or walkbacks, especially in the last few years.

Which corporate news outlet doesn't have a history of egregious lies and errors?

Unfortunately, for most of the population, it’s whatever they read/watch. For many conservatives, Fox News is gospel, and for many liberals, CNN is gospel.

Interestingly when Fox and CNN cover the same political event they can both come to opposite conclusions at the same time that present a victory for their side.

It really is like there are multiple realities.

But luckily enough, CNN and Fox are both more irrelevant than ever. There's a reason no young people watch. Young people get news from YouTube, Snapchat and other new media sources from people they trust.

The WSJ editorial board is garbage and will fall over themselves to side with corporate America even if it means making untenable arguments.

If you expect WSJ to not be in favor of hardcore right wing / business interest, then honestly its a lack of perception. They've had that reputation for years. You might consider taking this as an opportunity to reexamine where you believe level-headed and balanced lie in light of this example that you're familiar enough with to see the very large problems in their arguments and general position.

Absolutely. The general quality and of course objectivity of WSJ has gone downhill for years. It’s not a recent phenomenon.

In this case though, one would assume zero objectivity from any paper. The piece referenced is editorial.

Kind of a lazy one, though. And I say this as a WSJ subscriber who regularly finds the editorials worth reading even when I disagree with them. In this case, it's just knee-jerk anti-anti-capitalism without bothering to understand the nuances of the situation.

Would you say Washington Post is more balanced or about the same?

Totally agree; they should resign immediately.

I have found WSJ to carry one-sided articles with little factual basis quite frequently, actually.

Such travesties as: Perfect market theory, Chicago School/ dry economics, ignoring the negative effects of monopolies/ short-term extractive capitalism.

I know they used to be "reputable" but. Today large parts of America are a crumbling trashcan. Where is their acknowledgement of this problem, and how capitalism should solve it?

I would recommend The Economist as a factually-based business & economics subscription.

I can second The Economist. I find that they also have a pro-business/free market stance, but at least I find that they have reasonable and factual reporting, which I sometimes find lacking with the WSJ.

> I can second The Economist. I find that they also have a pro-business/free market stance...

To put it lightly. That stance defines it:

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/11/how-econo...

Thanks for sharing, fascinating read.

The AG's letter is a good read (and makes one angry too): https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/AG%20...

Still doesn’t make up for ICANN’s other scams.

The canned collection of TLDs should have been abolished years ago, but when it looked like ICANN was going to do it and allow arbitrary TLDs, they turned it into a gargantuan rip-off and sham.

nothing new. they constantly make quality arguments in favor of their bias

WSJ articles are closed off behind a paywall.