Here is the lineup on the breakfast table this morning. (And, yes, before you ask, that is a batik cloth in the background, from the old days in Indonesia.)
Overall front-page lead story in the WaPo: "Medicare's future appears brighter".
#2 off-lead front page story in the NYT: "Report Shows Better Outlook for Medicare".
Mentions of that story anywhere on the front page of the WSJ, including the news-briefs column: zero.
The new Medicare assessment does make a cameo appearance at the bottom of page 5 (see right). Instead the WSJ devotes its featured front-page space to whether the IRS is doing more inspections of Republicans, and the plush life of modern Washington. Plus a very good (really) story, in the tradition of the old WSJ "A-hed" front-page features, on the modern high-tech sock-knitting industry.
Homework assignment: as we have seen before, there is a testable hypothesis to apply to the evolution of the Wall Street Journal.
Being hypotheses, these are subject to testing and disproof. The experiment goes on.Homework assignment: as we have seen before, there is a testable hypothesis to apply to the evolution of the Wall Street Journal.
- Hypothesis: Under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch and the editorship of Robert Thomson, the Journal has deliberately been bringing its news operations into closer alignment with its editorial-page views.
- Sub-hypothesis: You don't see this shift in the line-by-line content of the stories themselves but rather in the headlines, subheads, and placement of the stories in the paper. That is, we're looking at editors' work rather than reporters'.
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