Wait a minute Farhad.

This article should have been longer. Much longer.

When you state the Times held off reporting you barely give context to the election in question. That election at one point was all Kerry's. Prior to the Swiftboat madness, and that's exactly what it was, Bush was being seen as nothing less then incompetent.

Fortunes swung though after the NEWS CYCLE! repeatedly crammed inuendo after inuendo down our throats about Kerry's service.

If however news of spying domestically in a way that breachs Constitutional Rights had been made known it's only an intellectual bore who'll state the general point of view would not have changed.

More needs to be said about this. Much more.

Sincerely,

Lloyd Little

It's increasingly looking like the New York Times and perhaps other members of the so-called "liberal" media deliberately attempted "to throw" the election or at the very least stupidly permitted themselves to be manipulated by the Bush Administration in a way that "threw" the election. It's just too coincidental that Miller/Plumegate, the wiretapping and other abuses of power, and all of the corruption stories hit the newsstands after the election instead of before it. The disappointment in Bob Woodward, for example, is stinging. Even now, it's like Plumegate has fallen off the map. Did this cease to be a story?

Is no one keeping score? Why is there no cumulative litany of all of the times that we, the American people, have been betrayed by both the Administration and the Press in the last six years. It's so disgusting that I want to stop listening/reading/watching, but then I remind myself that "eternal vigilence is the price of liberty."

All of this reminds me of why we need young people in journalism--people who haven't been co-opted, who don't have too much to lose, people who are too young to understand the risks they are taking by shining the light in dark places and speaking the truth to power--people who still believe what they were taught in journalism school.

Thanks Salon.com for your efforts.

I know many people who for decades have believed something isn't news unless the NYT prints it, and whatever it prints is true because they printed it. The apology for their screwups has always been something like, "But where would we be without the Times. It's still the best paper around." The paper itself has appointed itself the "Newspaper of Record," despite its censorious motto, "All the news that fit to print." The Times is the voice of the Establishment, and always has been. It scares itself when it starts doing the real job of a newspaper - to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable. It certainly has been afraid, or unwilling, to criticize George Bush directly very much, and it's so obvious as to make me want to scream.

The opaqueness of the Times has, if anything, been far worse in the past than now, and the internal politics about what got printed, and when, frequently a better story than the story itself. This was particularly true during the reign of A.M. Rosenthal as Executive Editor. The only difference now is the willingness of people inside the Times to speak out, and the many outlets for Times criticism that have developed. It used to be only The New Yorker magazine, and maybe the Village Voice, that got on the Times back occasionally, but being a critic of the Times now has career opportunities, after Jason Blair, Judith Miller, the coverage of the '04 'election', and now the domestic spying scandal. Gee. What next?

How long the Sulzberger family will tolerate Pinch's screwups remains to be seen. Auletta suggested they are circling the wagons to defend him, but, hey, it's their paper. That's what a free press is all about. It's free if you own it.

One question I've yet to see answered about this story is how the White House found out that NYT reporters were working on the story. It seems to me, if reporters are working on a story based on leaks of secret information, they're not likely to call the White House and say, "Somebody gave us this information that we're not supposed to have because they're not supposed to give it to us; is the information true?"

So -- how did it happen that the White House knew about the story and was thus able to tell the Times not to run it?

What did the New York Times know and when did they know it? It might have been nice for the American people to have this kind of information before the 2004 presidential election.

The formally dauntless NYT, are completely cowed by the Bush Administration. The Bush Administration has no shame nor morals and will not stop at anything to further their grasp on power.

When a Republican is in the White House, we are all reminded how "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

9

Anyone looking for some insight into why the NY Times has managed to screw up so royally in the past few years on issues as critical as the Blair fiasco, the Judy Miller fiasco, the coverage-of-the-'04-campaign fiasco (think Jodi Wilgoren's comparison of Kerry to a "caged hamster"), and now the wiretapping fiasco need look no farther than the New Yorker's excellent profile of Arthur Sulzberger last week by Ken Auletta.

What emerges is a portrait of a fairly well-intentioned, unreflective person who is inclined to reach snap decisions and who seems to see the world in black and white. In other words: Sulzberger seems like someone who is likely to stumble from mistake to mistake and not learn much from his blunders.

I have no independent way to confirm Auletta's impressions, but they certainly may explain a lot of the Times' recent maddening gyrations. And they make sense when you consider that Keller (for whom I am not inclined to make excuses) probably must defer to the (apparently flawed) judgment of his publisher.

There is no question that the Times' reputation has taken body blow after body blow over the last few years. And the remaining (relatively) independent media, such as Salon, as well as Times reporters have not been silent about the problems at the paper.

What remains astonishing in all of this is how the Sulzberger family, which owns the Times, can sit back and watch while Arthur apparently damages the paper so thoroughly and consistently.