Wall Street Journal

Tucker Carlson is a master contortionist. As conservative strategist David Reaboi reminded us this week, one of the most egregious examples of Carlson’s tendency for reality deformation came in the form of an interview with Kanye West, the troubled rapper who sat for an interview on Carlson’s erstwhile Fox News show a couple of years ago. It was the middle of West’s antisemitic meltdown, but because West was embracing Donald Trump, Carlson presented him as a sensible, even brilliant thinker. “Is West crazy?” Carlson asked at the top of the interview, before concluding at the end: “Not crazy. Worth listening to, even if you disagree with him.

The Washington Post is collapsing. Once one of America’s great media institutions, the paper lost $100 million last year and has shed 500,000 subscribers. Recent reports reveal that Post owner Jeff Bezos is going to be more hands-on to try and save the paper. Yet trying to get employees of the Post to do their jobs is like trying to get dogs to play baseball. Dogs just aren’t interested in baseball, and the breed of journalist now at the Post is just not interested in journalism. Always a liberal paper, the Post is now pure propaganda.

In last Friday's gossip column (which you really should sign up for), Cockburn revealed how Emma Tucker, the London newspaper editor who took the helm of the Wall Street Journal in February, has been unimpressed with the lousy work ethic of her new colleagues.  “What do they all do all day?” the former Sunday Times of London chief is reportedly prone to wondering out loud. Much to Cockburn’s surprise, the small piece of gossip has blown up on the internet, drawing the ire of America’s "hard-working" hacks.  It wasn’t long before journalist complaints started to roll in. How they managed to carve out the time to do so between copying and pasting press releases, Cockburn does not know.

The Wall Street Journal made an interesting hire last year that went mostly unnoticed, aside from minor trade publications. The NewsCorp-owned media outlet announced in May 2022 that they were bringing on Robin Turner to be the vice president of training, culture and community. Turner's charge was to work with Dow Jones newsrooms, including WSJ, to "drive DE&I strategy into all aspects of our global business." DE&I of course refers to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, those corporate and academic cultural programs that insist that historically marginalized groups require special treatment in order to overcome systemic oppression. DEI has become baked into the WSJ's news operation while simultaneously being excoriated by the paper's editorial board.

On Tuesday, Frances Haugen, speaking to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, compared Facebook to tobacco and opioids while pushing for similar regulations. Haugen, a 'whistleblower' who came forward after Facebook dissolved her team and who admits she never worked on child safety during her time at Facebook, told a terrifying story about an app that harms young girls. Social media is like a drug. We hear this all the time. We’re powerless addicts in the face of its influence. We need to keep the kids safe from it. But is it? And do we? I used to call myself a Twitter addict. It’s the first thing I check each morning and the last thing I look at at night.

The lockdown is dead...long live the lockdown?In an interview last Thursday on Spectator TV, WHO special envoy David Nabarro warned seven months too late that the ubiquitous global response to the coronavirus pandemic might be a bit of an oopsie-daisy: https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1314573157827858434 ‘We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,' Nabarro said. ‘Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer... It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.’Now, there was nothing astonishing about Dr Nabarro’s claims.

Welcome to the age of coronavirus, where lines snake around the aisles of supermarkets, millennials beg their boomer parents to stop going outside and the best sporting event on television is 10-pin bowling. America almost feels like a different country. Cockburn has seen a heartening amount of concern for loved ones over the last few days, especially among fellow journalists. To put minds at rest, therefore, he's been asking around to see what measures right-leaning outlets are taking to protect their employees from the virus. Across Rupert Murdoch's titles, the response has been robust. Workers at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post had the option to work from home last week, with a lot of editorial staff deciding to do so.