Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

To the Editor:

Re “Tilting Rightward at Journal” (The Media Equation, Business Day, Dec. 14):

I was amused by David Carr’s column about what he says is a rightward tilt in some news articles and headlines in The Wall Street Journal since the paper was acquired by Rupert Murdoch.

It isn’t that I haven’t noticed the same thing on a few occasions. It’s that my eye for political bias in what should be objective news reporting has been acutely sharpened over the last decade by countless instances of an unmistakable leftward slant in the articles and headlines that appear (and don’t appear) in The New York Times.

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are both excellent newspapers. But the principle of caveat lector applies to both—as it does to everything in print or digits.

Howard F. Jaeckel
New York, Dec. 14, 2009

Note from KBJ: The New York Times, which I read every day online, is a propaganda rag. This is sad, because it used to be a great newspaper. Why did the newspaper change? Because the reporters and editors wanted to be participants rather than disinterested observers. They're too stupid to realize that this lowers their status. Yes, it's more fun to "play," but it destroys one's credibility. You can't be both partisan and authoritative. You can be one or the other, but not both. That's known as Keith's Law.

Note 2 from KBJ: I'm agnostic about the Wall Street Journal, since I rarely read its news stories. For all I know, it's as bad as the New York Times. But even if it is, that doesn't excuse the Times for abandoning journalism. Two wrongs don't make a right. I might add that while I'm a conservative, I was a progressive from about 1983 to about 2003. I'm also a philosopher, trained to detect emotive language. The manipulative rhetoric in the Times is staggering. Much of it is obvious even to an untrained observer.