The Times, They Aren’t A-Changin’

Workers for The New York Times have gone public in their fight against the Times freezing pensions for some workers while giving handsome retirement packages to the bigwigs. Now can we all stop pretending that the Times is a bastion of liberal thought and action? They often engage in excellent reporting — Paul Krugman is one of my favoritist columnists of all time — but Krugman is actually a prime example of how the liberal voices at the Times often have to sneak themselves into the system. The Times hired Krugman to write on boom economic times — yay, unregulated Capitalism! — without an inkling that he’d become a popular and eloquent critic of George Bush. My interest in reading bloggers came about once I realized that the good ones were a more reliable and thorough source of information on the Iraq war than the Times. Judith Miller was a representative of the standard, not an aberration, and the current Times management is demonstrating that the Times have not changed.