Understanding The Wall Street Journal

I've actually come to enjoy reading it this summer. Its contents are much more diverse than they once were, its foreign coverage seems much improved ... but then I read a Palin-style op-ed like this one and wonder what on earth possessed them to run it. Tom Ricks has an explanation:

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.