The triumphal editorial in the New York Times on the Trump indictment provides this description of the editorial board above the high-fiving of the editorial's gleeful writer(s) — in the print edition, March 31, 2023:

The Editorial Board — A group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Au contraire.  The editorial board of The New York Times consists of a group of propagandists informed by the narrowest of partisan bias, hostile to dissenting views based on solid research, intolerant of debate, while falling back on longstanding views hostile to democracy.  While this group of propagandists claims to be "separate from the newsroom," the newsroom is, most certainly, not separate from the editorial board.

The false description provided by the editorial board of The New York Times of itself calls to mind the concluding paragraph of the majority opinion of Chief Justice John Marshall in Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1, 22 (1824):

Powerful and ingenious minds, taking as postulates that the powers expressly granted to the government of the Union are to be contracted by construction into the narrowest possible compass and that the original powers of the States are retained if any possible construction will retain them may, by a course of well digested but refined and metaphysical reasoning founded on these premises, explain away the Constitution of our country and leave it a magnificent structure indeed to look at, but totally unfit for use. They may so entangle and perplex the understanding as to obscure principles which were before thought quite plain, and induce doubts where, if the mind were to pursue its own course, none would be perceived. In such a case, it is peculiarly necessary to recur to safe and fundamental principles to sustain those principles, and when sustained, to make them the tests of the arguments to be examined.

The foregoing suggests the following as accurate description of the editorial board of The New York Times:

The editorial board of The New York Times consists of individuals confident they possess powerful and ingenious minds capable of contracting issues on public policy into the narrowed partisan compass.  Accordingly, the members of the editorial board apply a course of well digested but biased and metaphysical reasoning to issues of public policy — in particular discussions on the threat to the Constitution presented by Donald J. Trump — so as to explain away the Constitution of our country and leave it a magnificent structure indeed to look at, but totally unfit for use. The Times editorial board may so entangle and perplex the understanding of its base that principles before thought quite plain would be obscured, and doubts would be induced where, if the mind were to pursue its own course, none would be perceived.  After reading a Times editorial, it is peculiarly necessary to recur to safe and fundamental journalistic principles relying on facts, not partisan propaganda, and make them the tests of the argument to be examined.

Image: Adam Jones via Flickr (cropped).