'A Tea Party Knight Is Out'

David Warsh wonders if the WSJ is "changing things somewhat in the orientation of its editorial board":

A Tea Party Knight Is Out, by David Warsh: News, goes an old saw, is what happens near an editor. That’s what commenced last September when Wall Street Journal editors got hung up in lane closings at the George Washington Bridge.

Whoever they were, the editors passed along their displeasure and, perhaps, suspicions to the paper’s transportation reporter, Ted Mann. After a month of working the phones, Mann broached the possibility that the tie-up was deliberate, with a story on October 2: Port Chief Fumed Over Bridge Jam/Patrick Foyle Fired Off an Email Message after Learning of Lane Closure..., it was clearly the WSJ that first put Gov. Christie in play. ...

Aggressive WSJ reporting on a frontrunner for the next Republican Party presidential nomination is evidence that Rupert Murdoch hasn’t monkeyed with the longstanding culture of the news pages. ...

I mention it here because ... Murdoch may have an interest in changing things somewhat in the orientation of its editorial board. I refer to the departure of Stephen Moore to the Heritage Foundation.

Moore was the board’s chief economic commentator, a founder of the Club for Growth, enthusiast of Tea Party ideals, possessor of a master’s degree from George Mason University and a disciple of Arthur Laffer and Julian Simon. ...

The WSJ editorial page is a position of enormous influence... Depending on how Moore is replaced, the opportunity exists for Murdoch’s paper to play a constructive role... – perhaps even to modulate the spirit of intransigence that dates back to 1972, when editor Robert Bartley and Jude Wanniski initiated a new era of political economic discourse in US politics.

It was Bartley’s unrelenting attacks on Bill Clinton in the 1990s that established the predicate that presidents who are Democrats not only have bad politics, but are not legitimate. Much of the present-day animosity toward Obama got its start with Bartley’s over-the-top opposition to Clinton. ...

I plan to pay much closer attention to the editorial page of the WSJ in the months to come. Something is going on there.