The New York Times, I'm not alone.......

.....in thinking it's gone over to the Dark Side.

I had a major league rant against The New York Times here yesterday, The "Gray Lady' has fallen and she can't get up. Well Digby has weighed in.

I can't tell you how much it's going to chap my hide to see Karl Rove and his buddies skate because Judith Miller is covering for them. After watching them willfully and credulously print every smear that scumbags like David Bossie could dream up about Bill Clinton, the NY Times makes a fetish of protecting the Bush administration. Our paper of record has seriously lost its way. It is now little more than a Republican plaything; its reputation is being used as a vehicle to mislead the public; its ethics and standards are being manipulated to cover up corruption. Something is very rotten at the Grey Lady.

Meanwhile Gene Lyons has a generic critique of the "liberal media" which fits The New York Times to a tee.

Celebrity journalists and sleazy tabloid coverage have existed since newspapers began during the 18 th century. But the American press used to be regulated by an informal but fairly effective honor system. Now it runs on a star system not unlike Hollywood’s. Once a degree of professional visibility is achieved, it’s hard to lose.

I’d cite currently imprisoned New York Times reporter Judith Miller as Exhibit A. Her bungled" exclusives" on Iraq’s mythical weapons of mass destruction did as much to drive the U.S. to war as the Bush administration’s fanciful geopolitical imagineers. If she were a sports reporter, she’d have been laughed out of the profession. Baseball fans demand that you get the scores right.

[.....]

Meanwhile, if the news organizations on MRC’s laundry list owe fealty to the Democratic Party, they’ve an odd way of showing it. All of the above pushed the phony Whitewater scandal for years. They played Bill Clinton’s sexual sins bigger than the invasion of Normandy. Their coverage of the 2000 election clearly favored George W. Bush, and their failure to effectively expose the Swift Boat dirty tricksters probably decided the 2004 election. Their collective performance during the run-up to the Iraq war was a national disgrace. Otherwise, yeah, they’re more "liberal" than Rush Limbaugh. But then, that’s how the fundamentalist mind works in religion and politics: You’re either with them 100 percent or you’re the enemy. In that regard, no selfrespecting press organization can be anything but "liberal" in the sense of sharing a post-enlightenment world view that distinguishes between fact and belief. And facts, see, are the enemy of dogma.