Media wags and pundits have been whining about the dire consequences of Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the Wall Street Journal last year. Indeed, with Murdoch's professed desire for quicker, shorter stories, and his disapproval of quirky features running on the front page, it seems like the Aussie mogul intends to dumb down the business broadsheet. But exactly how dumb?

Radar compared the readability of the front page of the Journal on February 12, 2007, and February 12, 2008—dates before and after Murdoch purchased the newspaper—using the Gunning-Fog index, which indicates the number of years of formal education that a person requires to understand the text on a first reading. The results found that the front-page stories in last year's edition had an average 12.005 rating. The front-page stories in this year's edition had an average 11.56 rating, or just slightly more dumb. The results were similar when we used the SMOG readability index.

The paper's editorial page, on the other hand, has stayed at exactly the same level—what experts designate as the "pig-ignorant imbecility quartile"—over the past twelve months.