Jed Babbin of the American Spectator lays the Times’s decline at the feet of “Pinch” Sulzberger. The opener:
It’s been a bad month for the New York Times. The feeding frenzy it tried to stir up over Sarah Palin’s e-mails left the sharks unfed. And the “investigative” story that was supposed to prove Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be an unethical scoundrel fell flat because its theory was unsupported by the facts.
To top it all off, the Times is — for the third time in as many years — in an open feud with New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan for what the gentleman correctly labels anti-Catholic reporting.
But none of that will change the Times’ behavior. The Times is preparing itself for a huge push to re-elect President Obama and will leave no story unpublished that could possibly help Obama or hurt his opponent, regardless of who it is.
How did the New York Times — the paper of Abe Rosenthal, R.W. “Johnny” Apple and Bill Safire — become the paper of Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd? What changed it from the liberal paper that had been most fair to Ronald Reagan to the home of angry liberalism?
What happened? Pinch happened.
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. — known as “Pinch,” a diminutive of his father’s nickname, “Punch” — became the paper’s publisher in 1992 and has steadily transformed what was a newspaper into an ideological tool of the left. The final stage of that transformation will be completed in September, when Jill Abramson becomes the paper’s executive editor.
“Pinch” Sulzberger, as he demonstrated in his May 2006 graduation speech at SUNY New Paltz, is committed to a 1960s-vintage liberal ideology. He told the students, “You weren’t supposed to be graduating into an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, be it the rights of immigrants to start a new life; the rights of gays to marry; or the rights of women to choose. You weren’t supposed to be graduating into a world where oil still drives policy and environmentalists have to relentlessly fight for every gain. You weren’t. But you are. And for that I’m sorry.”
The rest here.