Les Jones

News > The New York Times: "Yep, We're Liberal"

New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent:

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.

I'll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything), but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

I've been relatively agnostic on liberal bias. It seemed to me that whether or not the media looked biased depended in part on one's own biases.

My own experiences weren't a useful guide. I was an editor on my university's newspaper. True, most of those people were liberal like I was, but we were college students, so what did you expect? I knew some journalists after that, and they were liberal, but so was I, so who do you expect I'd meet?

Now Edward Driscoll has collected quotes from and about prominent national journalists that erases all doubt in their cases:

Andy Rooney on Larry King Live in June of 2002 may have been the first when he said, "I'm consistently liberal in my opinions," and that he considers Dan Rather to be "transparently liberal." (Rooney's quotes later framed Goldberg's introduction to Arrogance, his 2003 book.)

In May of 2003, according to CNSNews.com, Bob Zelnick, who spent 21 years at ABC News, "confirmed fellow former ABC News correspondent Peter Collins' contention that anchor Peter Jennings routinely attempted to insert his left of center editorial slant into correspondents' news copy."

In August of 2003, Walter Cronkite added, "I believe that most of us reporters are liberal." (Does Lesley Stahl know this?)

And then ABC's "The Note" Weblog on February 10th of this year basically gave the game away in detail:

"Like every other institution, the Washington and political press corps operate with a good number of biases and predilections.

"They include, but are not limited to, a near-universal shared sense that liberal political positions on social issues like gun control, homosexuality, abortion, and religion are the default, while more conservative positions are "conservative positions."

"They include a belief that government is a mechanism to solve the nation's problems; that more taxes on corporations and the wealthy are good ways to cut the deficit and raise money for social spending and don't have a negative affect on economic growth; and that emotional examples of suffering (provided by unions or consumer groups) are good ways to illustrate economic statistic stories."

For more, see Rather Biased andThat Liberal Media.