“As News Corp. has consolidated its control of the paper they have increasingly come to demand enterprise journalism that serves the interest and viewpoints of the News Corp. management,” Glenn Simpson said. “The upper ranks are now dominated by conservative and partisan editors who aren’t shy about making their views known.”

Simpson is the respected former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, and that quote is from former WSJer Sarah Ellison’s new book War at The Wall Street Journal, which is recently out (and which you should go buy!).

We’ll have more on that later, but I bring this up in the context of a bit of a stir the paper created yesterday with its large front-page photo of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan playing softball. You don’t have to be a cynic to think that the Journal chose the two-decade-old picture to imply Kagan is a lesbian.

My wife, hardly a media critic, mentioned it to me unprompted yesterday as she looked at the front page. She was stunned that a paper would do something so obvious and ham-fisted.

Journal editors profess shock that anyone is drawing inferences from the picture. Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray, a holdover from the Bancroft era, it should be noted, was incredulous on Twitter, responding to a Fast Company editor’s question about what the paper was trying to suggest:

That she played softball?

And Murray told Politico’s Ben Smith “I think your question is absurd.”

It isn’t, of course. First of all, for the old Journal it would be (then again, that Journal would have run a small dot-sketch of her face). Photos are powerful and suggestive precisely because they are wordless. If the Journal is surprised by this, that’s already a problem.

And, of course, there’s a context to all this, starting with rumors, some propagated in the mainstream press and which everyone has heard by now, that Kagan is gay.

As Smith reports, activists saw the photo as implying exactly that:

“It clearly is an allusion to her being gay. It’s just too easy a punch line,” said Cathy Renna, a former spokesperson for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation who is now a consultant. “The question from a journalistic perspective is whether it’s a descriptive representation of who she might be as a judge. Have you ever seen a picture of Clarence Thomas bowling?”

Second, this wouldn’t be the first time the Murdoch Journal has had a laugh with dominant art. Recall that the paper used a picture of New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger to illustrate feminine male faces. Jeff Bercovici subsequently reported that Journal editor and Rupert Murdoch vacation pal Robert Thomson came up with the idea himself:

Thomson acknowledged, to the Observer if not directly to Sulzberger, that it was indeed Sulzberger’s chin and cheeks in the photo mosaic. But what he hasn’t acknowledged publicly is that the very idea of using the illustration to tweak Sulzberger was his from the start — and that it wasn’t a popular one among his Journal subordinates, who aren’t used to seeing their news pages used to carry out Murdoch’s personal feuds (unlike, say, their counterparts at the New York Post).

And, as Ellison reports in War at the Wall Street Journal, editors are picking the front-page photos.

Third, the Journal has certainly been attuned to the issue of Kagan and gay rights, running an early story (April 12), headlined: “Kagan Foes Stress Gay-Rights Stand.”

Ryan Chittum , a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is deputy editor of The Audit, CJR's business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu.