This behaviour is normalized for a while, the wall street journal wasn't an outlier back then, but now it seems to be also expected when working for big media outlets, just look at the recent Georgia debacle. Activists disguised as journalists pressure companies to act in their favour or they will throw a fit.
I'm about half-way through Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model laid out in "Manufacturing Consent". Corporate ownership of media houses is said to be the first censorship filter that determines which angles of a policy debate get highlighted and which ones don't. Along with reading Matt Taibbi's "Hate, Inc.", where Chomsky's model is extended to post-internet US media, I can't begin to describe how much of the US media coverage of these issues has begun to make sense to me.
As Chomsky points out, propaganda is still useful information, since the angles being portrayed in a debate tells us what a societal elite wants us to see (and conversely, not see)
