COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

Here's the New York Times' public editor, finally admitting the Truth That Dare Not Speak It's Name.

Is the New York Times a liberal newspaper? Of course it is...

Eric Alterman, where AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRREEE YOOUUUU????

Your central thesis is becoming less tenable by the day.

I'll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything), but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

That would include some prominent journalists.

But if you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world.

Sharp guy, that Okrent. I'm glad someone at the Times is finally noticing. All those emails are making a dent.

The culture pages often feature forms of art, dance or theater that may pass for normal (or at least tolerable) in New York but might be pretty shocking in other places.

I don't have a problem with that. Frank Rich is obnoxious, of course, but I think the Times' art pages SHOULD cover what is avant garde. After all, even Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" caused a riot when it was first performed.

They were a pretty pathetic pack of jackals when Giuliani moved to cut public funding on art that was patently offensive. (When push comes to shove, most journalists have no idea what the First Amendment means.)

And a creationist will find no comfort in Science Times.

Well, there's that cultural illiteracy again.

All creationists are not created equal. There are "new earthers" and "old earthers." I wouldn't expect a new earther to find comfort in the Times, primarily because new earth theology is fundamentally unsupportable on scientific grounds.

But if old-earth creationists are routinely dissed, then the Times does, indeed, have a problem, since journalists aren't really qualified to put a slide rule across the Kierkegaardian leap of faith.

And if the senior staff of the New York Times doesn't grasp the distinction between new earth and old earth creationism, then they don't really even understand what they're talking about.

America, outside a few dozen square miles around Manhattan and Hollywood, is still a nation of churches, just as Alexis de Toqueville said.

You don't have to BE a Christian to effectively cover social issues in America. But you sure as Hell have to understand Christianity--and the arguments and issues within it.

If senior journalists in Manhattan can't wrap their brains around the doctrine of submission and don't have a clue about new earth vs. old-earth creationism, then they're just not up to the job.

Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. doesn't think this walk through The Times is a tour of liberalism. He prefers to call the paper's viewpoint "urban."

BWAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!

Tell that to the Dallas Morning News. Or the Nashville Tennesseean.

New Yawk ain't the only town out there that's been urbing for some time. It's just the only one that so disrespects rurals.

But it's one thing to make the paper's pages a congenial home for editorial polemicists, conceptual artists, the fashion-forward or other like-minded souls (European papers, aligned with specific political parties, have been doing it for centuries), and quite another to tell only the side of the story your co-religionists wish to hear. I don't think it's intentional when The Times does this. But negligence doesn't have to be intentional.

Awesome. The New York Times' reader representative is all but accusing the Times of negligence.

Beautiful.

It takes some balls to do this from within the building.

But, hey...the Times wanted to become a

national

paper.

Welcome to the big leagues.

Every one of these articles was perfectly legitimate. Cumulatively, though, they would make a very effective ad campaign for the gay marriage cause. You wouldn't even need the articles: run the headlines over the invariably sunny pictures of invariably happy people that ran with most of these pieces, and you'd have the makings of a life insurance commercial.

Too bad we don't have an editor's response.

Taking the New York out of The New York Times would be a really bad idea. But a determination by the editors to be mindful of the weight of its hometown's presence would not.

Amen, brother.

Same goes for all of the New York media. To include FOX.

So what's wierd about this piece?

How in the world can anyone write a piece like this, and not once mention the Times' coverage of Iraq/The War Against Terror??

Bizarre!

Splash, out,

Jason