The Times (Almost) Admits Bias

Arthur S. Brisbane has spent the last two years as the public editor of The New York Times, a position not unlike that of ombudsman. He has written his valedictory column, before moving on, and it says some troubling things about "The Gray Lady." For example:

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.

In other words, the Times is biased because nearly everyone who works there is liberal. He could have also mentioned that the Tea Party was treated more like a curse than as a news subject, that's the flip side of progressivism.

Sadly, the Times' executive editor Jill Abramson simply denied Brisbane's assertion. She blamed any residual bias as being a "New York cosmopolitan" viewpoint. That is pure spin.

It is true that greater New York City is a very blue, very Democratic urban area. However, the Times once aspired to be the nation's news source. Perhaps Abramson is telling us we should view it instead as NYC's leading paper, with all the parochial biases that implies.