Write This Down

I’m back from a three-day getaway to my native South Dakota for the wedding of my nephew. It was a wonderful time. On Sunday morning we attended a lovely lakeside church service, at the close of which I was reminded of Power Line’s reach by a young man who approached me and said that I should get home and start posting, as he was getting tired of checking our site and seeing Gerhard Schroeder with a big mug of beer. He needn’t have worried; the Trunk was in the midst of furiously posting. (As to Peter Schramm’s question, by the way, I think I could have supplied the answer had he been with us this weekend.)
One thing I missed was yesterday’s not-so-startling admission by “Public Editor” Daniel Okrent that the New York Times is a liberal newspaper:

Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?
Of course it is….Start with the editorial page, so thoroughly saturated in liberal theology that when it occasionally strays from that point of view the shocked yelps from the left overwhelm even the ceaseless rumble of disapproval from the right.
Across the gutter, the Op-Ed page editors do an evenhanded job of representing a range of views in the essays from outsiders they publish – but you need an awfully heavy counterweight to balance a page that also bears the work of seven opinionated columnists, only two of whom could be classified as conservative (and, even then, of the conservative subspecies that supports legalization of gay unions and, in the case of William Safire, opposes some central provisions of the Patriot Act).

Okrent focuses on the social issues, and ascribes the Times’ monolithic liberalism to the fact that it reflects its New York home. Somewhat laughably, he suggests that the jury is out on whether the Times’ bias extends to “politics and policy,” and says that he’ll “want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything.”
Earth to Okrent: The Times has been covering the current campaign for over a year now. If you haven’t noticed the paper’s slant, you’ve inadvertently been reading the New York Post instead of the Times.
Still, Okrent’s admission is a step forward. Like any malady, liberalism has to be diagnosed before it can be cured.

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