By William K. Black
Washington DC: January 6, 2015
I’ve written recently about the embarrassing nature of the New York Times’ coverage of Greece (and the eurozone more generally), so it is time to describe the even more appalling coverage by the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ has published a series of articles that contain facts that demonstrate how self-destructive the troika’s infliction of austerity has been to the eurozone, but those articles do not express that conclusion.
Worse, the WSJ publishes a steady dose of articles by Simon Nixon that are presented (at least on the web where I read them) as if they were news articles. Nixon’s job title with the paper is “Chief European Commentator,” but that title is not stated in the series of recent articles about Greece and the eurozone. He appears to have a B.A. in History and once worked as an investment banker. I assume that the WSJ’s defense of his columns is that he is a “commentator” rather than a reporter of the news though on the web I see no indication that readers are warned that they are not reading a news article.
