Boo Hoo, those mean old bloggers are picking on the poor little New York Times. Clay Walker of the site Times Watch (see note below) attended an Upper West Side gathering of deep thinkers from the liberal establishment.

For those who already know the Times has a liberal bias, the Halloween night Times Talk at the New York Historical Society on Manhattan's Upper West Side didn't provide too many scares. [....]

Talk turned to the Internet and the "nastiness" of current politics. Richard Berke blamed bloggers for making reporters' jobs harder —— the following is a paraphrase, as Times Watch's shorthand isn't that great.

 

Joking, or maybe half—joking, the affable Berke said, "There are some good blogs, like Dick's [fellow panelist Dick Polman]. The bad blogs are the ones that take on the New York Times." He continued, roughly: "Some of the blogs take a toll on our reporters. One question on our minds is, 'What are the blogs going to say?'...Reporters have to be careful not to pull their punches...There are people dedicated to analyzing and picking apart whatever we say and do, not always in a bad way, but sometimes it's just mean—spirited...The bloggers are after us...we try not to be affected, but foremost in our mind, we know that everything we write will be picked apart...you have to ignore those people that go after you...I'm afraid that blogging...creates problems for people to do their job."

At least the Times is aware of the criticism of blogs like TimesWatch, even though the paper apparently shrugs it off as a bothersome annoyance.

Clay may be willing to take small comfort from being noticed and shrugged off, but I take no comfort in it at all. I want a full fledged critique from Berke and the others at the Times. Rather than impugn our motives, I would like a serious response to the many points we Times critics have made. Failing that, I suppose I would settle for being part of an emenies list, preferably in a Times article suitable for framing.

Note: At the invitation of Clay Waters, jsut yesterday I started cross—posting my new articles and commentaries on the Times at Times Watch. I suppose it might be seen as important to disclose this new relationship, though it has no effect on what I write other than giving me a larger audience.

Thomas Lifson   11 01 06