Joe Sobran likes the NYT.

(Note: The link above will take you to Joe's current on-line column. The archive is here. Not all of his past columns are available in the archive.)


What about the famous liberal bias of the Times? It’s certainly there, not so much in overt ways as in the tacit assumptions the paper habitually makes about the reader. It seems to go without saying that the Times reader believes there’s a government solution to every problem, and that he doesn’t believe in the supernatural. The paper’s coverage of religion is minimal, and the activities of Christians — papal elections, say — are of interest — “fit to print” — only insofar as they are potential threats to liberal causes. When Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope, the Times reported the fact with an undertone of alarm. It had hoped for someone less — well, Catholic. Even the huge Sunday edition has no religion section.

Catholics may write in the Times, so long as they are Garry Wills. That is to say, they are allowed space to attack the Church for being insufficiently liberal. Defenders of the Church hardly ever appear in the paper, and the orthodox Catholic reader feels a bit like a man attending a party he hasn’t been invited to, with uncongenial people. The Times fairly cries out to him, “Your kind aren’t welcome here!”

The Times tries to make a show of ideological balance on the op-ed page (a Times innovation of the Spiro Agnew era), but even its “conservatives” are liberals — that is, neoconservatives. For many years this niche was filled by William Safire, a chum of Ariel Sharon; today it’s occupied by David Brooks, who takes the position that there’s no such thing as a neoconservative, thereby proving that he is one. Only neoconservatives deny the existence of neoconservatives, on the principle, I suppose, that Satan’s cleverest wile is to make us think he doesn’t exist.

Hee hee.

But whereas Safire blamed Christianity for the Holocaust, Brooks can write sympathetically about Christians. Still, Brooks is as statist as any liberal, and he’s scornful of old-fashioned conservatives who favor limited government; he wants what he calls “national greatness conservatism,” with America dominating the globe (while maintaining a welfare state at home). Brooks once championed the war on Iraq, but since it has gone bad he has been rather subdued about it.

In general the Times has been ambivalent, but mostly skeptical, about this war — never opposing it directly, but supplying plenty of ammunition, as it were, for those who do. This is the way it also handled the Vietnam war for a long time, avoiding explicit commitment until liberal opinion had solidified against that war.

The New York Times is of course the Establishment paper par excellence, a bellwether for all the major media, which imitate not only its news judgment but its cagey liberalism. But it contains plenty of good writing, and it’s an indispensable guide to what the most influential folk in America are thinking.