January 09, 2005

THE MOOSE in the room at the NY Times -- people don't trust the paper. It's a paper in documented decline, and no one at the paper seems willing or able to say why. Just SAY IT folks. Constant bias means bad journalism, and the NY Times is chock full of political bias. When Sulzberger starts charging for the online version of the Times the wake-up call will come when readers won't pay for demonstrably bad journalism, from the news pages to the book reviews to the editorial pages. A bit of good stuff here and there (science, business) doesn't make up for the overall stinko smell of the paper.

Sidenote. I completely disagree with Kathryn Jean Lopez who suggests everything would be fine if newspapers like the NY Times would simply admit their partisan bias. If they did that, everything wouldn't be fine. Actually, no, it wouldn't. Partisan papers turn out bad journalism. Take this example. The British press is openly partisan and it produces famously bad journalism. Or read the press releases of the Democrat and Republican party -- it just isn't journalism. Please, just give me good journalism -- without the bias. I'm not sure a big city newspaper in the country is capable of that. But I'd like to see at least a few of them try.

UPDATE: Scott Campbell (Blithering Bunny) thinks I'm missing the full story on the British press:

.. it's noticeable that the bad broadsheet journalism [in Britain] that results from bias (in contrast to the bad journalism that simply comes from the tabloid mentality) is almost always from the left, i.e The Guardian and the Independent. The Times and The Daily Telegraph are clearly right-wing, yet they produce some of the best journalism and analysis in the world.
UPDATE II: InstaPundit -- "the Bush Administration -- and Republicans generally -- should be overjoyed to hear that the NYT is considering turning its web edition into a pay-only site, a sort of oversized Salon.com." Heh. Posted by Greg Ransom