The standards of the Wall Street Journal‘s news content and its editorial content are radically different because the mostly affluent people who pay to read it are fine with bullshit in political punditry but actually want the news (especially the business news) to be accurate.It's the basic observation people have made for decades, but with the assumption (both pre- and post-Murdoch WSJ, it was a trash fire before he bought it) that the opinion section was just some weird nonsense that Very Savvy Rich Well-Educated People Who Read The Financial News tolerated.
True for some, perhaps. True for the kinds of liberalish people who read the WSJ for news and chuckled at the opinion pages. But the Masters Of The Universe are not all so discerning. The love their right wing media too, and have been getting it right into the veins from the respectable Wall Street Journal for decades.
It's ancient history now, but the WSJ opinion pages during the Clinton years were barely different from the kinds of gibberish you get from Fox and OANN now. It was wrong to assume those highest advertising dollar target consumers were not nodding along in agreement, or that many other respectable media figures weren't as well.