When I became the editor of Racine Labor in 1979, I initially ignored the WSJ that came to our offices every day,

Then an experienced labor journalist informed me how indispensable the page one stories were. While the editorial pages expressed a remarkably vicious and  short-sighted "take no prisoners" perspective on virtually every issue that displayed an almost schizophrenic split with its news coverage, the news stories were too good to be missed.. 

I was highly skeptical about the news stories, but started reading them anyway. Much to my amazement, I found story after story that needed much broader circulation, and based many Racine Labor stories on ideas originally found in the Journal..

The Wall Street Journal came up with story after storyl that was simply ignored by the rest of the corpororate media:
**The Journal devoted serious coverage to the movement against plant closings in the 1980's.
**The Journal, back in the late 1980's and even as recently as last year, has exposed majr corporations' reluctance to hire African Amerian workers for auot plants because of their greater support for unionization.
**The Journal provided the best initial coverage of the "Reagan ranches" shanty-towns proliferating on the edge of Sunbelt towns as dislocated RustBetl workers and their families set up modern-day "Hoovervilles."
**The Journal exposed how the Nicaraguan contras were entirely a creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, from recruiting its leaders, drafting its constiution, and and guiding them each step of the way in posing as indigenous opposition to the Sandinista revolution.
**The Journal offered a great story on how Grehound buses and its owner Dial drove up its stock price by promising automated ticketing, but then experienced a wave of riots inside their stations when the equipment predictably malfunctioned.
**More  recently, the Journal highlighted Prof. Alan Blinder's warnings to white-collar workers, quoting Blinder as predicting that nearly 40 million jobs were "highly off-shorable."

But under the reign of Rupert Murdoch, there has been an exodus of some excellent journalists, , and the news pages are much more closely aligned with the paper's insane editorial stance. This is one case where maintaining schizoprehnia would have ben healthy. Roger Bybee