Donald Luskin lets Okrent have it:
DANIEL OKRENT: FIG LEAF FOR THE TIMES' LIBERAL BIAS New York Times "public editor" Dan Okrent has finally published his long-awaited column dealing with the Times' liberal bias. It's a complete cop-out, and Okrent has degenerated into nothing but a fig-leaf.
Okrent's column starts with a head-fake. Titled with a question -- "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?" -- the column's first four words are "Of course it is." But that's as truthful as it gets.
A paragraph later, Okrent totally side-steps the heart of the issue of the Times' liberal bias: its coverage of the presidency, of the war, of economic policy, and of Washington. He says,
"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..."
So someone who has lived day in and day out with the New York Times for the last seven months still has to watch campaign coverage before he "concludes anything"? Is the matter of the Times' liberal bias such a close call that it will take Okrent another couple months to be absolutely positively sure?
And it's only this list of "social issues" that "ignites the right"? It must be that to Okrent the definition of "the right" has nothing to do with politics -- it's all social issues. Yes, he lumps in gun control and environmental regulation among "social issues," but never mentions them again in the column. By focusing just on soft social issues, Okrent gets to redefine liberalism as little more than a matter of style. Thus, he is able to quote his boss entirely defining away the entire notion of liberal bias:
"...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.'"
Okrent swallows his boss's evasion hook, line and sinker and spends the rest of the column equating "liberal" with "urban" -- reducing the question of liberal bias to a triviality. You can take the Times out of New York, but you can't take New York out of the Times. La-dee-da...
But hasn't this always been Okrent's approach? It's the same thing he did in his June 27 column when he trivialized as a mere "misstep" the outrageously false and liberally biased June 17 Times headline "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie." It's what he did in his April 25 column when he trivialized the Times' bias and inaccuracy by defining what it meant to be "the newspaper of record" as covering "the appointment of two vice presidents at an auto parts company; the daily docket of bankruptcy proceedings in local courts; a listing (title, author, publisher, price) of every book published that day; obituaries of 24 luminaries of very faint wattage; a roster of the 35 ships that had sailed from the Port of New York since Thursday night, another of the 35 that had arrived."
But Okrent doesn't always trivialize the Times' shortcomings. In his May 30 column he lambasted the Times for being insufficiently suspicious about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. That's right -- he was upset about the one single tiny element of the Times' coverage of the decision to go to war that overlapped with the views of the Bush administration.
Of course, while Okrent seeks to evade the tough question of "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?" -- or, more precisely, to answer the question "no" by answering it "yes" in a trivializing manner -- his column actually answers the question perfectly. Okrent's column is, itself, an example of it. I officially declare the Okrent experiment a failure.
Update... Here's how bad it's gotten with Okrent. How about this howler: "... the Op-Ed page editors do an evenhanded job of representing a range of views in the essays from outsiders they publish..."
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