Brad DeLong described this as "Most Dishonest Wall Street Journal Editorial Ever." I thought that was obvious hyperbole, if for no other reason than the data set encompassing dishonest Wall Street Journal editorials is far, far too large for Brad to have comparatively evaluated in a mere day or two. It'd be like declaring a yawn from moments ago your favorite breath of air ever. It might have felt that way, but that's a hasty choice from a large pool.
Brad, however, may be right. One of the ways that mendacious ideologues can lie with statistics is to simply draw and ill-fitting line through the data, pretending it shows something entirely different than it really does. As Mark Thoma shows, the Wall Street Journal did exactly that the other day, and in a particularly transparent and embarrassing way -- they were attempting to save the Laffer curve's reputation, and suggest that corporate tax rates should be much lower in order to optimally enhance revenue. The manipulation of the graph was embarrassing, but the argument it served made the whole thing malicious.
Like many others, I'm cool to the idea of Rupert Murdoch buying the Journal. But there is an upside to it. While many professional media observers have the secret decoder manual that tells them to ignore the paper's Neanderthaloid editorial page and only pay attention to the top-notch reportage, most of the Journal's millions of subscribers don't know to make such a distinction, and so the newspaper's terrific reputation also bolsters an unbelievably pernicious and problematic op-ed page, which in turn exerts great influence on the country's monied set (and that set matters). If Murdoch took over the paper and ran its reputation into the ground, we'd lose a lot of good reporting, but the editorial page would also lose influence, becoming something more akin to The Washington Times. I can't decide if, on the whole, sacrificing the news to kill the opinions would be a net benefit or a net loss, but I'm thinking about it.
