The New York Times has come under sustained assault in recent years. In 1993, Times alumnus Hilton Kramer anticipated the trend when he began writing a weekly New York Post column dissecting the gray lady's ongoing machinations. The attack intensified in June 2000 when Ira Stoll, then of the Wall Street Journal, set up smartertimes.com to expose editorial sloppiness, gross misreporting and telling silences on the part of what purports to be our national newspaper of record. Shortly before Stoll gave up this labor of love to help found the New York Sun, Andrew Sullivan began cataloguing on his eponymous web site the most egregious misreporting to be found in the news columns and on the editorial pages of the Times. The assault gained in ferocity this past summer when Charles Krauthammer, George Will, the editors of the Wall Street Journal and the Times' own staffer Bill Keller joined with Sullivan and others in remarking on the degree to which partisanship has come to distort the reporting of the news now that Howell Raines is executive editor of the New York Times.
Though true, these accusations need to be taken with several grains of salt, for the attack on the Times presupposes the existence of a golden age when the gray lady actually lived up to her motto: "All the News That's Fit to Print." New Yorkers of a certain age have for decades rolled their eyes when they glanced at the upper left-hand corner of the Times' front page. In its own bailiwick, the Times has never been above making the most of the peccadilloes of those to whom it is opposed, and over the years it has consistently relegated scandals involving its favorites to the back pages, if not to the executive editor's circular file.
