On Dean’s World Joe Gandelman asks Is the New York Times Liberal?” and analyzes today’s column by New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent.
Determining your position or an institution’s position in the political spectrum is like finding your location in the world. You look left—there are people there. You look right—there are people there, too. That means you’re in the center, no? Everyone is at the center of their own universe. There is no GPS for classifying political positions.
Even when everyone you know believes certain things or votes a certain way doesn’t necessarily mean that your beliefs are majority beliefs or even in the mainstream. That is a fallacy, either Hasty Generalization or possibly Biased Sample.
As far as the New York Times goes I believe that Mama Rose in the musical Gypsy says it best: “New York is the center of New York”.
I really wish that Daniel Okrent (or Pinch Sulzberger, for that matter) would just say “Sure, the New York Times has a liberal bias. It’s a New York paper written for New Yorkers. You don’t like it, screw you.”. Wouldn’t that be the New York think to do? Maybe that’s what Okrent is trying to do. Is he from out of town?
I note that Paul at Wizbang has a very similar reaction arrived at independently.
