But post-Murdoch the business and financial reporting is slowly disappearing from the front page in favor of “urgency and variety” — read trivia and sensationalism. Now we routinely get 3 and 4 column headlines which in the past were reserved for truly important news. Now we get valuable front page space being used up with color photographs, e.g., one of Obama eating pancakes recently. Now we get front page stories devoted to California’s ruling on same-sex marriages, the use of shark’s teeth as currency in some Pacific island, and other junk that is more appropriate for USA Today or the tabloids.

What we are steadily losing (it gets worse every week) is the in-depth and insightful coverage of business and financial news which used to be the Journal’s beat. The only thing that isn’t changing is the knee-jerk reactionism of the editorial pages; however, it was easy enough to ignore that as long as the rest of the paper was written by competent reporters who stuck to their beat.

I wish someone would start a website devoted to documenting the decline and fall of the Wall Street Journal. This is truly a devastating national event and deserves documentation. I have written to the so-called editorial oversight committee and received no reply. They seem unwilling to act in the face of Murdoch’s persistent dumbing-down and sensationalizing the paper.

Milt Garber
Missouri