TW: As Ritholz say mixing politics and investing is a recipe for disaster. Now that Murdoch et al. have control of the Wall Street Journal watch out. As he frames the editorial pages of the WSJ have always been a swamp of right-wing polemics in opposition to any and all even marginally progressive ideas. The actual business news pages were far less partisan, this appears to be changing for the worse.
From Barry Ritholz at his Big Picture blog:
"The politicalization of the WSJ has moved to a new and more risky phase. The paper is now in danger of being a money loser — not for its investors (tho that has already happened), but for those traders who read its content.
It used to be that articles on the Market or specific companies or various finance stories were objective and reliable and free from bias. Sure, you could always count on money losing, bat-shit crazy nonsense in the editorial pages, but that was a special area of sequestered partisans, who due to their insanity cared not a whit about how much capital their lunatic ravings lost their readers. (The list is long and varied, but the Boskin “Obama Crash” on March 6th is a good place to start; then read anything Don Luskin writes — he is a reliable contrary indicator).
I assumed the drunks on the OpEd page did not care about what they did to your portfolio if you drank their Kool-Aid. But they were easy to steer clear of — you simply avoided that page, or read it and laughed. Smart investors could easily say “Go sell crazy somewhere else –we ain’t buying.” That was possible because you knew that the business pages were sacrosanct, always run with a steel-eyed objectivity that professionals could rely upon.
That is no longer the case. The lunatics now run the asylum, and henceforth, I am moving the WSJ into the column of “Stuff to read, but not take very seriously.”
I am bereft over this. This is a major change for me, for I have loved this paper for years, even decades. I read the Times (along with many other papers), but as someone who works in finance, I marveled at the quality and breadth of the business reportage at the Journal. Accuracy was paramount, political bias limited to the cartoon (Opinion) pages. For a long time, it was the best paper in America.
Those days are now ending.
...Politics and investing are a fatal combination to performance.
....Hence, I must now move the Journal out of my column of “Essential investor reads,” and into the column marked “Infotainment.” Under Murdoch, the paper has become politicized to the point of losing a significant portion of its value.
Investors beware."
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/01/wsj-jumps-the-shark/
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