New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent is a real breath of fresh air.
Here’s the headline to his last column: Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?
His answer?
Of course it is.
It just gets more interesting.
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.
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.
[Many good examples you should go read]
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.” He says that the tumultuous, polyglot metropolitan environment The Times occupies means “We’re less easily shocked,” and that the paper reflects “a value system that recognizes the power of flexibility.”
He’s right; living in New York makes a lot of people think that way, and a lot of people who think that way find their way to New York (me, for one). The Times has chosen to be an unashamed product of the city whose name it bears, a condition magnified by the been-there-done-that irony afflicting too many journalists. Articles containing the word “postmodern” have appeared in The Times an average of four times a week this year – true fact! – and if that doesn’t reflect a Manhattan sensibility, I’m Noam Chomsky.
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.
Not everyone would agree with Okrent on intent, but he does a pretty clever dance to get to the answer that the Times is sloppy, but not biased. It’s a clever dance because most of his examples seem more like bias to me. Bias and all, the Times is still one of the great newspapers of the world, simply for the resources it can bring to bear, the quality of its writers, and the depth and breadth of its coverage. Yes, they have blind spots (because of bias, I contend), but one simply is not fully informed if he ignores that newspaper.
Locally, I would say that the Comical used to come much closer than the Times to meeting the “sloppy but not biased” standard that Okrent describes. I can’t think of any of my left-of-center blog buddies who would disagree with me when I call that newspaper truly awful. They tend to get agitated over the accusations of liberal bias — accusations which admittedly can be overdone in the absence of diligence — but I just don’t think it can be denied that Jeff Cohen has given that newspaper a much more liberal edge. And since he’s come on board, good judgment seems to have declined across the board at the newspaper.
Ultimately, that’s much more disappointing. To me, at least.