Free People, Free Markets: How the Wall Street Journal Opinion Pages Shaped America

George Melloan, born in Greenwood, IN, was a writer and editor at the Wall Street Journal for 54 years. He joined the paper as a reporter in Chicago, moved to Detroit and then successively managed the Cleveland and Atlanta news bureaus. He became a page-one editor in New York in 1962 and in 1966 went to London as a foreign correspondent covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He covered the Six-Day War in Israel in 1967 and the Biafran War in Nigeria in 1968. In 1970 he joined the editorial page and in 1973 became deputy to Robert L. Bartley, editorial page editor and later editor of the Journal. In 1990, he moved to Brussels to take charge of overseas editorial pages, starting an op-ed foreign affairs column title "Global View.? He retired in 2006 but still writes occasionally for the Journal opinion pages. In 2009, he was author of The Great Money Binge: Spending our Way to Socialism, which is about the causes of the 2008 market crash.

This book is about how the Wall Street Journal's opinion pages became the leading forum for the discussion of political and economic policies in the US. The Wall Street Journal also is international, with print editions in Europe and Asia, translated supplements in many foreign newspapers and online products available globally. The opinions on its pages are thus also part of an international debate. This book goes back to the original editorials of Charles Dow and his beliefs in political and economic freedom, to explain how the Journal attained such prominence and influence.