Last weekend The Wall Street Journal editorial page let its misogyny and snobbery show…more than usual. Even more people learned what the rest of us have known for years, which is that the Journal editorial page really really really sucks.
There’s an old adage that you never want to be the main character (the star of the outrage cycle) on Twitter. Well, last weekend the main character of Twitter was the WSJ opinion page, and boy, was it deserved. But I postulate that Joseph Epstein’s dumb misogynistic attack on Jill Biden for using the title doctor is not nearly the worst WSJ editorial or oped of the last six months.
But first, a moment on the misogynist attack, the title of which was, “Is there a doctor in the White House? Not if you need an M.D.” The first sentence addressed the 69-year-old Ph.D. as “Madam First Lady — Mrs. Biden — Jill — kiddo.”
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Joseph Epstein’s opinion piece managed to imply that DOCTOR Biden’s work on community colleges is somehow lesser: “Your degree is, I believe, an Ed.D., a doctor of education, earned at the University of Delaware through a dissertation with the unpromising title ‘Student Retention at the Community College Level: Meeting Students’ Needs.’” Yes, Epstein used the term “unpromising” to describe the dissertation that I would bet you a billion dollars he did not read or even glance at.
But more than that, the implication here is that community college and dissertations about them are somehow less worthy of academic distinction than dissertations on, say, Newtonian physics.
The smug classism here is pretty fucking disgusting, as community college is one of the greatest equalizers in American education, and retention at community college is one of the most important issues facing American education. Retention is a big problem in education as a whole, but especially in community colleges. Vox points out that “according to the National Center for Education Statistics, the retention rate for two-year institutions, at about 62 percent, was almost 20 percent lower when compared to four-year institutions.”
But the misogynistic oped by Epstein was not nearly as bad as the June 16 column written by the “head of the coronavirus taskforce,” Mike Pence. It was titled “There isn’t a coronavirus second wave.” The piece included the usual condemnation of the media because it “has tried to scare the American people every step of the way, and these grim predictions of a second wave are no different.” About 175,000 people have died of coronavirus since that opinion piece was published. Perhaps the head of the coronavirus task force was wrong?
And then there’s the racism. Who could forget the February opinion piece referring to China by the headline “Real sick man of Asia,” written by Walter Russell Mead. Marc Tracy, writing in The New York Times, noted that despite a letter of protest signed by 50 employees on the news side, “The headline was not retracted, and the Chinese government soon expelled three Journal reporters in what it said was retaliation.” And Tracy also mentions the very important detail that in “July, nearly 300 news employees sent a letter to The Journal’s publisher, Almar Latour, identifying a ‘lack of fact-checking and transparency’ on the opinion desk.”
And then there was the Kimberly Strassel opinion piece, which was everything the Trump campaign dreamed of in its wildest propaganda fever dreams, like it was written by Santa Monica Goebbels Stephen Miller. It’s a sort of narration of Hunter Biden’s text messages and then a lot of innuendo including musing about a Senate report and where money sent to a company called Hudson West might have gone. It was at best pretty speculative stuff highly reliant on one source, Tony Bobulinski, who emerged in the final days of the campaign with some wild allegations that didn’t even pertain to Biden’s time as vice president. Strassel alleged a lot of things that sounded shady, but she wasn’t exactly able to prove anything concrete.
The entire story was quickly debunked by… The Wall Street Journal news side, which wrote, “Text messages and emails related to the venture that were provided to the Journal by Mr. Bobulinski, mainly from the spring and summer of 2017, don’t show either Hunter Biden or James Biden discussing a role for Joe Biden in the venture.” Alex Shephard wrote in The New Republic that “Strassel’s column seems, in retrospect, a last-ditch effort to give the story the veneer of respectability it desperately needed. By batting down Strassel’s column, the Journal’s news side was asserting its independence, refusing to play a part in a partisan scheme.”
After last weekend’s disastrous Epstein piece, Opinion Page Editor Paul Gigot provided this amazing apology, which was neither an apology nor amazing, but instead a weird paranoid attempted indictment of the Biden Camp: “Why go to such lengths to highlight a single oped on a relatively minor issue?” he wrote in a letter to readers. “My guess is that the Biden team concluded it was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message to critics as it prepares to take power. There’s nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism.”
Ahem. If the piece was about such “a minor issue,” why run it at all? It was baffling. Ultimately Gigot blamed “cancel culture” for the shitty misogynistic op-ed’s negative reception. Everything conservatives don’t like isn’t cancel culture. For cancel culture to exist, said thing must be canceled.
I’m sure Rupert Murdoch doesn’t care that his opinion page is ruining one of his few real journalistic outlets, but he should because once you go full Fox News, there’s no coming back.
