Answering one of Professor Walt’s puzzlers

One quiet summer day, FP blogger, Stephen Walt posed a series of questions about things he doesn’t understand, like why we need so many nuclear weapons. I can’t answer most of them, but I can address his No. 6, which was this:

I certainly don’t get the business model that informs the content of the Wall Street Journal‘s op-ed page. The rest of the newspaper is an excellent news source, with reportage that is often of very high quality. The editorial page, by contrast, is often a parody of right-wing lunacy: the last refuge of discredited neoconservatives, supply-siders, and other extremists. Do the Journal’s editors really think democracy is best served by offering the public such a one-sided diet of opinion?

Here is the answer! Having toiled at the low pay but high morale WSJ for 17 years in my well-spent youth, I can say that the view we held on the news-gathering side of the organization was that the newspaper’s business formula was brilliant — the news side told American business what it needed to hear, while the edit page told American business what it wanted to hear.