10/30/2020 My Wall Street Journal Home Subscription - Cancel It

Once upon a time I was happy to be able to get the Wall Street Journal delivered to my home. Local papers had gutted their staffs and picked up more and more syndicated material, with less and less locally written, local news. 

 In recent years I saw the Louisville Courier Journal implode, the quality of every page of the rag these days is an embarrassment under Gannett's ownership. Editorial bias is a given with most print papers, and the C-J, as Louisvillians often refer to it, is no exception. I could live with that, and did for a long time. But over time the C-J let writer after writer go, and eventually the paper was nothing more than a political editorial in a hollow shell. For a while we kept the C-J just for the coupons in the Sunday edition. But even those, over time, we found weren't often for the products we use, and wound up pretty useless to us. I ditched the C-J for good 8 or 9 years ago, before we moved to Florida.

I tried the USA Today for a while, before we moved. Other than the free copy the give away in a hotel lobby, the USA Today is a truly worthless, shallow, empty comic book pretending to be a newspaper. In the long list of things that are "not worth the money", USA Today is prominent. I do like the puzzles, and the TV section was helpful in a hotel when I was on a trip to see what was on to kill an evening.

When we moved to Florida, for the first year or so we were here we took the Charlotte Sun. Everything I said about the C-J is also true of the Sun except the ownership. If anything, the Sun is inferior to the C-J, and that's saying quite something. If it was delivered here for free, I'm not sure I'd ever look at it. In fact I'm sure I wouldn't. I'd call and have then cancel to save me the nuisance of throwing it away every day.

I like my NY Post. Funny, I remember as a kid, my dad used to commute from Staten Island to mid-town Manhattan to work each day. He took the Staten Island Rapid Transit to the Staten Island Ferry, then took the #1 train to Rockefeller Center. I think he used to hop off the #1 and onto the express at Chambers St., then hop off the express at 42nd, and back on the #1 for a couple of stops. And on the way to work he read the NY Daily News, which in those days was the more conservative of the two major New York City tabloids, the other being the New York Post. Sometimes on the way home dad would grab a NY Post, too. I remember it was the afternoon edition, which had all the late sports scores, which was great. I didn't care about the news, or the editorials, or the puzzles. I like the Daily News and the Post because they had awesome coverage of the Mets, Knicks, and Giants, my main sports interests as a boy and as a teen. Still to this day, I guess. I get the N.Y. Post here in Florida. I read the editorials, work some of the puzzles, and when the Mets, Giants, or Knicks don't totally suck, I like to read about them. Most of the time that's sort of depressing, and I don't bother. that will change when one of them has a good squad.

Of the other two New York papers that I can get locally, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, for me there's been nothing to the decision: the Times has sunk to a nadir so low, I don't know if it will ever recover. It's pure political propaganda. Unabashed, unashamed, and untethered to truth, it's a joke of a publication, something sad to see from a once proud paper.

Today's WSJ

 And that brings me the the Journal, the WSJ as they say. Right of center, with a focus on business and economic issues, I have really enjoyed the Journal for most of the time I've taken it. But here, in the era of Trump, I've come to a crossroads. The Wall Street Journal has joined the rest of the mainstream media, with the exception of Fox News (of which I am no big fan at all, really), not a one of them is doing any diligent investigation or reporting on the Hunter Biden/Joe Biden stories. Sure, it's been touched, barely, on the Editorial pages, but I've see no investigative or journalistic content about it otherwise in the WSJ since the story broke. I've heard rumors that the Biden Campaign has let all outlets know that if they give service to this story, that they'll be blacklisted by a Biden White House. I can't presume to know if the WSJ has acquiesced to those threats, if they're just full on never-Trumpers at this point, or what. All I know is to me it's unacceptable. Totally and completely unacceptable. I'm cancelling my subscription to the WSJ. If this is what they've become, then I need the WSJ in my house no more then the Louisville C-J, USA Today, the NY Times, or Charlotte Sun: i.e. I don't need it. Useless to me.

From Today's NY Post

Funny, the one paper with the balls to break and cover the Joe and Hunter Biden corruption story is the NY Post. Founded by Alexander Hamilton over 200 years ago, and now with a conservative editorial leaning, the Post is locked out of Twitter for having the audacity to cover this scandal. The Post. Silly, catchy headlines. Pictures of celebrities. Almost always a swimsuit babe somewhere in it. Gossip. The goddamned NY Post are the only major print entity in my sphere with the balls to cover this. Cancel my Wall Street Journal. I get the Post.