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**FEBRUARY 25, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

Fact and Fiction at the Journal

In recent weeks, the endless dialogue between the

**Wall Street Journal**'s news pages and editorial pages has looked
more and more like an actual debate. While the news stories laid out the
multiple causes for the failures of Texas's grid during the state's
visit from the polar vortex, the paper's editorials clung like
barnacles to the notion that the state's limited reliance on wind was
entirely responsible for the grid's downfall. At least one editorial
was explicitly devoted to arguing why the news stories were wrong.

The gap between news and opinion is actually one between fact and
fiction, as is the case at other Murdoch enterprises (see, e.g., Chris
Wallace vs. Sean Hannity at Fox News). This is not to deny that the

**Journal**'s editorial pages were light on factual substantiation
even before Rupert bought the paper. But the combination of Murdoch and
the Trumpian zeitgeist has rendered

**Journal**editorials so deeply premised on beliefs that can't stand
empirical scrutiny that they increasingly are closer to a Hannity rant
than they are to rational argument.

Today's

**Journal**features a stellar front-page news

story that documents that Texans who get their power from the state's
deregulated energy companies have paid $28 billion more over the past
two decades than those who get theirs from traditional utility
companies. For the past 20 years, fully 60 percent of Texans have been
required to buy their power from the "free market" of those deregulated
energy companies-the same companies that boosted their short-term
profits by deciding not to invest in resiliency, the same companies that
saw the hourly bills for some of their customers soar to nearly five
figures, thanks to the genius of deregulation.

Never one to let stellar reporting that runs counter to pure
laissez-faire ideology go unanswered, some editorial page editor chose
to counter by publishing an op-ed

by an energy company CEO, who argued that it was regulations that
blocked resiliency in the power industry (in particular, regulations
that forbade companies from charging more for their product).

There's more to heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy,
Hamlet told Horatio, and the

**Journal**editorialists would have a firmer grip on heaven and earth if
only they gave credence to the facts that the paper's news staff so
diligently reports. Since they don't, the takeaway from the editorials
increasingly seems to be that if they had to pay for the

**Journal**, the editorialists would cancel their subscriptions.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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