It should be noted that WSJ’s opinion section is extremely politicized. Their regular news desk is separately edited and maintains decently high journalistic standards.
It's pretty weird actually. The news desk for the WSJ is among the best out there. Their news stories tend to be really dry in a good way - full of facts and figures, with very little in the way of click bait hyperbole. Their subscriber model is all about business people who want the details and not opinion...
Which then makes the opinion desk at the WSJ a real oddball. It's consistently right-leaning, sometimes to the point of absurdity. I would think that a more varied field of opinion would resonate better with their target reader... but what do I know.
Isn't that the point of Op-Ed sections, at the end of the day? It's always been a way for newspapers to host what's effectively a glorified collection of Medium posts. Even the New York Times' Opinion page is consistently partisan.
I'm not sure the New York Times is a good example here. It's definitely not just their opinion page that is partisan these days, and whilst this does seem to have gotten worse I'm not sure there was exactly a golden era - they seem to have always been particularly keen on pushing narratives.
Yeah, I don't disagree. My question was targeted more at folks that specifically find the WSJ Op-Ed to be objectionable; in my experience those same people tend to consider the NYT's Op-Ed to be less objectionable (caveat: I'm operating on an N of like 4).
The most internally consistent position, IMO, is that Op-Eds are all partisan and should all be abolished, in every paper. They once served a useful purpose, but are arguably no longer necessary in a world where everyone can post an opinionated blog post on Medium/Substack/etc and broadcast it out to the world via Twitter/Mastodon/etc more or less for free.
This article we're commenting on is just an interesting (if potentially dubious) blog post by a surgeon, and nothing more than that.
The weirdest part is this leads to frequent items where the Op-Ed page makes factual claims that are directly contradicted by the news section in the same issue.
This isn't particularly unusual. The opinion section is a fine place for dissenting views. Consider a news article covering the abuse of elderly in a nursing home, with an opinion piece defending (or explaining, or whatever) the nursing home - this could be good.
There's a difference between explaining and defending the abuse the news-side reported, and saying that the abuse never happened and the news side is wrong/lying/etc.
IMO, the Financial Times is a good alternative to WSJ.
Global perspective but still does deep dives into American issues; not owned by Murdoch; opinion desk not insane; soothing peach background color in both paper and online editions.
It makes sense in a “game theory” kind of way. Writers/influencers will want a pulpit and a huge chunk of the population wants to read political rhetoric rather than dry news. I think I prefer this approach to something like NYT or (esp) WaPo where the news is so intermixed with the agenda that they are almost indistinguishable.
BBC with more extensive coverage (more than just the breaking news) would be my ideal model.
isn't OP-ed synonym for what they generally disagree with (e.g. to allow them to claim they're "listening to both sides") ?
relevant example from this week is Australia, where editor in chief for the Murdoch conglomerate has no answer to why they banish all articles about climate change science to the Opinions sections.
"op-ed" derived from "opposite the editorial page", i.e. recto to the editorial page's verso. In general, the op-eds do not vary that much from editorials. The NY Times always has conservative columnists that it runs, but they are not necessarily that far right.
> It should be noted that WSJ’s opinion section is extremely politicized.
All opinion sections of every major news outlet is extremely politicized. In almost all cases, the non-opinion sections are edging towards being extremely politicized as well.
