Times Ombusdman: "Yeah, we're pretty much shills for the left..."

Like we didn't already know it.

Arthur Brisbane, in his last column as "public editor" (ombudsman) of the New York Times:

I also noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.

As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.

No conspiracy, though. Whew, that's a relief!


OK, this is not a revelation. I've said it before.

But there's another way that bias manifests itself, and we don't always notice it as clearly. That is selection bias, covering as news issues or events that really aren't, just because it can make one party (say, the Democrats) look good or one party (for example, the Republicans) look bad.

That's just the way it is. But it's nice of Mr. Brisbane to acknowledge it...