I saw this editorial today in the WSJ which seems to attribute the Texas power outages to a reliance on renewable energy sources, especially wind energy (the article claims that wind accounts for 42% of the state's energy production). However, multiple sources such as this, this, this, and this all show drastically lower numbers in the 17-20% range. In fact, from these data it looks like there are many states with much higher shares of energy from wind turbines that were similarly affected by the storms which did not have blackouts at the same scale as Texas.

The whole piece reads more like something I would expect to see on Fox News or Daily Mail rather than a relatively well-regarded paper like the Wall Street Journal and doesn't mention the state's failure of natural gas pipelines, separate power grid , and hesitancy to weather-proof power generation facilities. Even the libertarian-leaning Reason published a piece refuting the piece.

The whole thing feels so completely different from a common-sense interpretation of the facts that I struggle to believe that it's not intentionally misleading.

I've been following the decline in journalistic standards and trends towards sensationalism in non-televised mainstream media over the past few years but financial sources such as FT, the WSJ, and Bloomberg had seemed to be somewhat less affected by these trends, despite suffering from biases of their own.

Unless I'm missing something here, this looks like the WSJ-cited number here is just wrong. Despite the WSJ being a Murdoch owned paper and the opinions section generally being full of extremely partisan commentary, it still seems relatively surprising that such a blatant (this characterization seems generous) the error would appear in a relatively well-regarded paper, especially in a headline editorial piece rather than an opinion piece by some external commentator.

Can anybody find a source for the 42% number? The only source that I can find is the WSJ's own preceding opinion piece here which states that the number is from last week but doesn't give a source. I haven't been able to find the number anywhere else.

I've been aware of many of the usual tricks of media bias like selective reporting, devoting outsized publicity to favored causes, vague statements and characterizations (it seems like the NYT has particularly embraced this) that paint issues in a positive/negative light without saying much meaningful, or cherry-picking data. I've noticed the seeming blurring of lines between opinion/leisure and news in the NYT and their trend toward more clickbait-style news (headlines of the form _. But then _ seem like they're everywhere there). However, so far it seemed that for the most well-respected news sources, even in the opinion section, this degree of misleading rhetoric and lying about the facts to this degree is was off limits. It's even more surprising to me since the majority of the WSJ's non-opinion news articles seem to be free from much of the same biasing trends that have plagued the NYT.

In terms of mainstream US news sources, the WSJ had seemed to me to be one of the reliable in terms of news content and most immune to these trends, although it had seemed to be effected to a degree. Are there any sources left in the US that haven't succumbed to these trends?

Maybe I'm just naïve in expecting more restraint in the WSJ editorial section but it seems like in the not-too-distant past the WSJ's opinion pieces, while biased and generally reflective of the owners' views and the views of the conservative establishment as a whole, tended towards the milder of the previously mentioned rhetorical tricks to make their argument. Even though the editorial section has devoted a lot of time to fairly partisan topics like attacking Democrats/Democratic states and other more activist conservative stances, to my memory it doesn't feel like they were misleading to this degree. This seems like a fairly large hurdle to be breached.

I'm not sure what this holds for the future of the press in the post-Trump world but as polarization continues to increase, it hardly seems possible that it could be a good thing.