Bloodthirsty Liberal

You have to wonder if the Caracas Times is as slavishly devoted to Hugo Chavez as the NYT is to President Obama:

Acknowledging what the blogosphere has known for weeks, the New York Times finally went on record to admit that just before last Election Day it killed a politically sensitive news story involving corruption allegations that might have made the Obama campaign look bad.

But the admission on Sunday, which came seven months after NYT staff reporter Stephanie Strom’s reporting about possibly illegal coordination between the Obama campaign and ACORN last year, took the form of a snarky column from Clark Hoyt, the Old Gray Lady’s “public editor.” Hoyt used the word “nonsense” to describe the allegations of impropriety leveled against ACORN and the Obama campaign.

…

Hoyt writes:

The story involved allegations that Barack Obama’s campaign, in league with Acorn, a left-leaning community activist group, was guilty of technical violations of campaign finance law. Evidence supplied by the source could not be verified. Even if the story had panned out, it is hard to see how any editor could have regarded it as momentous enough to change an election in which the Republicans were saddled with an unpopular war and an economic meltdown.

…

A quick digression: Of course, we can only wonder what the New York Times would have done if it had gained information that John McCain’s campaign had committed technical violations of campaign finance law. The NYT did publish a blog item about the DNC’s allegation that McCain’s campaign had illegally procured a loan and the paper was only too willing to imply in a Feb. 21, 2008 story that McCain was having a romantic affair with a female lobbyist three decades his junior. The charge, which was based on information provided by anonymous sources supposedly working for McCain, ultimately proved groundless and the newspaper retracted it a year later. The NYT disingenuously claims that it had never intended to suggest that the lobbyist “had engaged in a romantic affair with Senator McCain.”

The Spectator points out that the Times found the source verifiable enough to run plenty of stories about ACORN, just not one that would have made Obama look bad.

But since that excuse is patently bogus, he has another one! It wouldn’t have changed the election. That’s probably right, if irrelevant to journalism.

A candidate associated with the likes of Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers (not to mention Tony Rezko and Rod Blagojevich), who talked openly of spreading the wealth and “redistributive change”, who found America so embarrassing that he apologized for it in Germany and took off his flag pin at home after 9/11 so as not to be lumped in with people he thought were displaying false patriotism—for someone like that to be elected president in spite of all of the above, this story would have changed nothing.

But it would have helped us figure out how we got where we are today. About the only thing positive I can say about my Boston Glob is that it’s slowly bleeding the Old Gray Lady a little grayer every day.

UPDATED
Let us harken back to the thrilling days of yesteryear, when the Times was merely pathetic, hypocritical, and full of [bleep], instead of the morally and fiscally bankrupt rag it is today:

…we are agnostic as to where a story may lead; we do not go into a story with an agenda or a pre-conceived notion. We do not manipulate or hide facts to advance an agenda. We strive to preserve our independence from political and economic interests, including our own advertisers. We do not work in the service of a party, or an industry, or even a country. When there are competing views of a situation, we aim to reflect them as clearly and fairly as we can.”

Even the Times has to change with the times. Besides there’s good money to be made.