And keep in mind this was in a news article. Yet more proof that Rupert Murdoch is slowing turning the Journal's once-sterling newsroom into Fox News Lite.

Picking up the right-wing blogosphere trend, which was to mock personal anecdotes told at yesterday's health care forum (shared mostly by Democrats), here's the straight-down-the-middle WSJ news headline:

Talks Suffer An Outbreak of Anecdotes

Gee, nothing loaded in that language, right?

Check out the lede [emphasis added]:

Thursday's health-care summit revealed a new malady: call it anecdote-itis.

Squeezed around a square table at Blair House, President Barack Obama and about 40 members of Congress scratched around for stories that would score political points.

And here's a nice tough, as the news article openly mocks the president:

The president, playing the part of Patient Zero, sparked the epidemic, recounting the time his daughter Malia was rushed to the ER with asthma after coming into the kitchen and telling her father, “I can't breathe, Daddy.”

UPDATED: There's something deeply revealing, I think, by the media's tendency to mock yesterday's anecdotes, which of course were personal illustrations about people suffering serious health problems, and their struggle to deal with today's health care system.

In a sense, the so-called health care debate that's taken place over the last year or so should have always focused on those sorts of illustrative stories, but the press never really went there. The political press never had any interest in humanizing the story. The Beltway press much preferred to make health care reform a process story. (Who's got the votes? What's the latest polling data.)

So I guess it shouldn't be surprising that when some Democrats tried to use anecdotes to shed some light on health care reform, one media reaction was to mock the move.