The conservative Internets have been all aflutter the last couple days with smoking-gun proof that the New York Times has a liberal bias. On January 28 the NYT had an editorial called “Filibustering Nominees Must End,” arguing against the Republican tactic of filibustering nominees. Of course a few years ago they were publishing editorials encouraging Democrats to filibuster under Bush. Boom! Gotcha!
Now this certainly looks like run-of-the-mill partisan hypocrisy, but it’s the same sort of stuff that liberals use all the time to accuse Fox News or the Wall Street Journal in the opposite direction. We all know that they’re all biased one way or the other, and people trot out things like this from time to time to disprove claims of objectivity, but no one really believes any of them are objective anyway, so how much does this really matter?
I thought it was interesting that the same day I read about the New York Times filibuster hypocrisy I also read an editorial by a conservative about the Obama administration’s position on contraception and the health care bill and how this affects Catholic hospitals and what this has to do in the larger picture of government coercion crowding out voluntary forms of community. And this editorial was in the New York Times. In fact, Ross Douthat and David Brooks are conservatives with regular columns in that organization that conservatives love to hate for being so liberal. It looks like Bill Kristol has been involved as well.
It struck me that you never really see that kind of thing in the Wall Street Journal. I suppose you could argue that Paul Krugman or Rachel Maddow would think it beneath them to contribute to such a pungently conservative organization. And it’s also true that Brooks and Douthat aren’t necessarily the biggest proponents of smaller government (case in point: Today Brooks calls for a National Service Program). But the fact remains that the “liberal” New York Times regularly features conservative opinions in its pages and the Wall Street Journal does not. (I don’t think anybody would argue that Alan Colmes really counts for Fox News, although I’m open to it if you have a good case.)
I will never be surprised to see proof like we saw last weekend that the New York Times is hypocritically liberal, just as I will never be surprised to see liberals on the Internet proving that Fox News is hypocritically conservative. But as long as the New York Times spares some space for conservative columnists and allows them to make intelligent arguments for conservatism, they will warrant some respect from me.