1. Starting in 2002, the Times kept running front page articles by Judith Miller ramping up the Iraq invasion when any halfway bright journalism student could have pointed out that most of her anonymous ‘sources’ were identified as senior Bush officials or Iraqi ‘dissidents’ like Ahmed Chalabi — in other words, people who were using her to promote the war.

2. Before the 2004 election the Times sat on a story that could have been damaging to Bush’s reelection campaign because they didn’t want the news to have an impact on the election. I suppose if Bush had killed an innocent man just to watch him die weeks before the election they wouldn’t have run that story either — don’t want to affect the election, y’know — journalistic standards of ‘fairness’ and all. However, at the same time, every bogus and unsourced Swift Boat claim against John Kerry was prominently featured.

3. From his installation as president by the Supreme Court in 2000, the Times doggedly and repeatedly ‘cleaned up’ quotes from Junior Bush’s speeches so he didn’t sound like such a moron. The editors apprently trusted that their readers would never come across videotape of these quotes on those new-fangled television or Inner-Tubes machines.

As John Hess, a veteran reporter for the New York Times, said:

“[I] never saw a foreign intervention that the [New York] Times did not support, never saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don’t let me get started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?”

The New York Times Company, like every large corporation, received generous tax breaks during the Crawford Dauphin’s reign, as well as concessions from the FCC for their media endeavors — why would they want to muck that up in the name of journalism?