The Wall Street Journal is doing sports now?

Especially since the years 2000-2003, I have nothing but hateful, bitter scorn to how the major US news outlets handle important news, such as, just off the top of my head, elections, terrorist attacks, and wars. The disgust I feel for how vapid and uncritical most editors and talking heads have been in their handling of the emergence and unfolding of the Bush presidency is probably best articulated here. It makes me want to shudder and puke just thinking about it.

Anywho, for reasons like those, I've always bought into the cliche that the sports page is the only honest part of the newspaper.

Paradoxically, I think a lot of this who feel this way also feel some sort of sadness about the much-trumpeted decline of the newspaper. Despite the, to be honest, partial hatred I feel toward many writers and editors of newspapers who helped drum up support for attacking Iraq (and Iran), I'd still like to see these newspapers become what they were in our great imagined past when journalists were journalists and men were men. And all that. We'd love to see widely-circulated, thoughtful reporting of and commentary on important events.
Where am I going with all this? For starters, much-discussed changes in how people get their news has led to some potentially thoughtful (if sanctimonious) debate about the role of access to high-power sources (like traditional news outlets have); specifically, whether this leads journalists to serve as mouthpieces of these sources, or whether it actually gives journalists access to more important information.
I tend to avoid self-important discussions about journalism, but one domain in which I can stomach this kind of talk is, no surprise here, the world of sports. I think it's great that websites like deadspin and others bring an outsider's perspective to the world of sports; likewise, I like to get the up-close perspective that connected journalists at places like ESPN can provide. Ideally, the outsiders can keep the journalists honest and in check, and the journalists can be informed by the thoughts and concerns articulated by outsiders.

So, despite the nausea I felt (due to the parallels between "sports leagues" and political and corporate administrations) in reading the following quote...,

Q: Are sports leagues too controlling in imposing rules on how they can be covered?
A: From a journalist's perspective, absolutely. As Pat Jordan wrote, the
access gets worse all the time and the fans get less out of the coverage because
it's forced to be more superficial. Interviews are shorter, if they can be
landed at all, and the P.R. folks -- not all, but many -- are exerting way too
much control. I understand why the leagues and teams do it. They're all in the
media business themselves now, and they're just taking money out of their own
pockets if they let someone else air a press conference they're perfectly
equipped to air themselves. This is pure speculation, but I wonder if there
isn't some connection between this increased restriction and the rise of the
kind of sports gossip that is a legitimate violation of athletes' privacy.

... I have some optimism that the WSJ's resources can enlighten and elevate the level of discourse in the world of sports, which will hopefully draw attention to how much better a job places like the Journal and the Times could handle subjects which are, to me, a lot less fun, but a lot more important.