All The News That's Fit To Print

The New York Times has a position they call the "Public Editor." It's sort of a cross between an ombudsman representing the readers and what the British term the Loyal Opposition.

That position was held until recently by Arthur Brisbane. While one might quibble with many of Mr. Brisbane's observations, I find myself in complete agreement with at least one statement in his final column:

...the (NYT) is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

That statement is, of course, cherry-picked and taken somewhat out of context. Mr. Brisbane, like the loyal NYT staffer he was, takes great pains to defend the paper while at the same time acknowledging its faults. I think he gives the Times too much credit for maintaining its objectivity. I'm not the only one.

A just-released Pew Research Center survey found that The Times’ “believability rating” had dropped drastically among Republicans compared with Democrats, and was an almost-perfect mirror opposite of Fox News’s rating. Can that be good?

No, it's not good. But IMO it's well-deserved. Journalism in general, and the NYT in particular, has morphed from 'just the facts, ma'am' to spinning the story to advance the writers' -- or the papers' -- point of view.

It's not just me that's saying that. No less a personage than Clark Kent of The Daily Planet fame feels the same way.

He can leap a building in a single bound, but even Clark Kent seems to be giving up for now on the newspaper industry.

Clark Kent criticizes his Planet editor Perry White, with Kent at one point telling the editor, "I've been a journalist barely five years now. Why am I the one sounding like a grizzled ink-stained wretch who thinks that news should be about -- I don't know, news?"

What is the world coming to when meek, mild-mannered Clark Kent rants about journalism's declining standards?

Thank God for the Internet.