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.