Another crusty old relic of the “principled conservatism” of the pre-2016 Donald Trump era has gone off the rails in spectacular fashion, and the only thing that remains is for the general public to adjust itself to the new reality. Which should be easy enough, if one can ignore the orchestrated stylings of a veritable chorus of voices emanating from the big-box media and political world who still need the wreck to run on schedule.
The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 17 published a feature news article disingenuously presented as standard real estate journalism despite the obvious motive of dropping an early Christmas culture-war stink bomb into the laps of its subscribers. “One Throuple Had Three Separate Design Tastes. How Did They Manage a Renovation?” read the headline to the piece filed under a “Luxury Homes” subsection tag.
It Had to Go Out of Its Way to Do This
All the boxes for silly, gratuitous wokeness were checked. “When corporate strategist David Gobberdiel and pharmacist Ryan Tungate started living together in Chicago in 2013, they never intended to open their relationship, let alone their home, to a third partner. But when they met consultant Michael Cowell, 35, through mutual friends in the summer of 2018, things took an unexpected turn,” the article began.
A bizarre effort to normalize a “relationship” involving three men proceeded to unfold. “Real-estate agents are noticing more throuples and polycules buying homes together, often with everyone’s name on the deed,” the WSJ piece remarkably stated.
Readers of Liberty Nation News should not be surprised by this latest faceplant by a major brand newspaper that was considered a revered media institution for most of the last century and well into this one. On Feb. 23, LNN reported how the paper welcomed the return of President Donald Trump to the White House after a four-year hiatus by immediately going on the attack against him and his second-term administration on numerous fronts.
It also detailed how the paper’s news staff had become filled in recent years with “reporters” hired directly from hard-left media outlets such as Vox and HuffPost. Here’s but one example.
“Dominique Mosbergen is a ‘medical science reporter’ at The WSJ’s Health and Science bureau. She has been active of late, filing one article after another portraying Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a dire health care threat,” the LNN article noted. Mosbergen came to The Journal “straight from HuffPost, where she worked for ‘a decade,’ her WSJ bio states.”
Throuple author Vaishnavi Nayel Talawadekar is a regular contributor to Vogue India. Vogue is every bit as left-lurching on social and cultural issues as Vox, HuffPost, and any of the other niche progressive media outfits that The Wall Street Journal is unmistakably seeking out for “talent” these days.
At what point does a newspaper that employs “journalists” with stridently leftist professional backgrounds and goes far out of its way to glamorize “throuples” in its pages in the most woodenly propagandistic manner lose any credible claim to its hallowed “conservative media” mantle? Not anytime soon, if those who value citing The Journal as a solid-right news source have any say in the matter.
Why It Will Remain a Go-To Media Source
Cue the predictable Google search. A random inquiry of the phrase “even the conservative Wall Street Journal” for 2025 results alone shows how the game works. That exact wording was utilized multiple times over the past year to give added weight to notably hostile attacks on the Trump administration by various media professionals.
“Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board has noticed,” CNN host Anderson Cooper remarked on Aug. 25. “Friday [Aug. 22] they weighed in under the headline: ‘Trump’s vendetta campaign targets John Bolton.’ This FBI raid makes clear that second term success for the president includes retribution, the editorial board writes. The real offender here is a president who seems to think he can use the powers of his office to run vendettas. We said this was one of the risks of a second Trump term, and it’s turning out to be worse than we imagined.”
Cooper then introduced fiercely anti-Trump CNN commentator Jeffrey Toobin, using the WSJ editorial as a running board for the usual network hysterics that followed.
“Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board said that [Trump judicial nominee Emil] Bove’s ‘reputation lately is as a smashmouth partisan who wields the law as a weapon,’” Pennsylvania news site PennLive “reported” on July 31 in the wake of Bove being approved by the US Senate.
“Even the conservative Wall Street Journal sees through it,” MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) related on May 12 in a news piece trashing Trump’s tariff agenda.
As you can see, it’s a handy weapon for a lockstep dominant media apparatus to have in its arsenal. And let’s not pretend the newsroom and editorial board are distinctly separate entities. Do you really believe a newspaper ownership group that is determined to promote cultural leftism in its news pages will tolerate a truly independent ideologically conservative editorial desk?
Even the Google AI slop that tops its search results unintentionally nails the importance of fake conservative news sources in service to a baked agenda.
“The phrase ‘even the conservative Wall Street Journal’ highlights instances where the WSJ’s typically right-leaning stance was challenged or when its editorial board expressed views not commonly aligned with hardline conservatism, often in criticism of Republican figures or policies, showing that even a staunchly conservative publication can diverge from extreme viewpoints, particularly on matters like political conduct or specific crises,” robo-Google stated.
“In essence: It’s a rhetorical device to signal that a situation is so significant or concerning that it’s prompting a reaction from a normally reliable conservative source, notes The New York Times and Yale Insights.”
That last sentence says it all. By harnessing the contrived “device” of a “staunchly conservative” Wall Street Journal trashing rightist policy or personalities, progressive establishment entities such as CNN, The New York Times, and Yale University hope to bring an implied balance to their partisan ambushes.
It was a neat trick for as long as it worked, and indeed it did for quite some time. Unfortunately, when you have Vox, HuffPost, and other assorted cultural leftists serving up “conservative news” offerings, you’re bound to end up careening off the bridge and into the gorge eventually. And once that reputation has been torched to ashes in the public eye, it’s gone forever.
