The original draft of the email below was sent to Wall Street Journal editor in chief Matt Murray and copied to his deputy Neal Lipschutz, chief news editor Jason Anders, editorial page editor Paul Gigot, visuals editor Shazna Nessa, and CEO and publisher Almar Latour. It notes several seemingly unrelated elements of the Sep. 7 print edition’s A section and suggests they’re all part of a not-so-subtle effort by straight news staff to promote a woke, progressive agenda. Unknown is whether the email’s seventh paragraph helped prompt the next day’s lead editorial, which appropriately criticizes the “partisan advocates” masquerading as medical journal editors and their recently published propagandistic editorial that overheated climate czar John Kerry and lying Tony Fauci couldn’t have written more misleadingly themselves.
September 7
Dear Mr. Murray,
It seems you’ve let your news editors become a parody of media wokeness, and today’s A section is rife with examples.
First are the photo choices for two separate stories, one about holdout VHS lovers and one about being a morning person. The A2 photo of a VHS lover includes her lesbian wife for no apparent reason. Similarly, the A11 photo of an early riser includes, also for no apparent reason, his gay husband and, wait for it, their Shih Tzu.
Talk about over the top. In any case, readers are left to wonder if there are any heterosexual married couples anywhere in America who may like to rise early and/or pop in a VHS movie.
Then there’s the A6 photo accompanying the story about child vaccine trials. Readers aren’t told if the white mother of a young black boy on a doctor’s exam table adopted the child or is married to and conceived with his biological black father. But implicit in all three photo choices is news editors’ eagerness to signal their trendy embrace of both interracial and gay marriages.
Mind you, none of my criticism here should be construed as an expression of ill will toward either interracial or gay couples. I was half of a loving interracial, albeit heterosexual, relationship long before such relationships were chic. But considering that gays constitute less than 5% of the general population (according to Gallup), and interracial couples still constitute barely 20% of all U.S. married couples, shouldn’t the Journal occasionally deign to publish photos of same-race heterosexual couples other than those sometimes found in Friday’s strictly-for-rich-folks Mansion section?
You don’t have to answer that rhetorical question if you’ll indulge me a moment longer to point out two additional, if marginally more subtle, examples of woke bias in today’s edition.
The A3 story about medical journal editors’ call for action on climate change by reporter — not editorial board member — Robert Lee Hotz begins by saying, “Editors of 220 leading medical, nursing and public health journals . . . called for urgent action . . . .” (my emphasis). But by which everyone-gets-a-gold-star standard can all 220 journals be deemed “leading”? Surely some of them must be terribly contrived political rags, eschewing peer-reviewed research if it contradicts governments’ command-and-control inclinations, no?
And then there’s the worrisome front-page story detailing young men’s increasingly frequent choices to pass on college educations. If knowledgeable readers carefully scrutinize the roughly 3,000 words they can find subtle hints about the war America’s political left has waged against supposedly ADHD, toxically-masculine, rapist boys for four decades or so. But wholly missing from the story are any straightforward quotes from myriad experts who, for nearly as long, have been warning against the predictable results — such as plummeting education levels — this war on boys would have. As though the “Overthrow the Patriarchy” left isn’t directly responsible for many of boys’ and young men’s troubles.
Of course, few go into journalism because they think all is right with the world. So grownup readers of all political stripes should be able to tolerate a little leftist dogma on supposedly straight news pages, provided the dogma doesn’t become ubiquitous and even laughable, as it is in today’s A section.
But things were already bad enough with opinion editors, on the same day, seeing fit to publish the manipulative, self-interested musings of America-undermining billionaire George Soros for the second time in less than a month. It all makes one wonder if WSJ’s significant subscription price is still money well spent.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.