Yeah, that is ridiculous. That paper has taken so many hits to its journalistic integrity over the past 4 years that its hard to view them as anything more than an arm of the Bush admin. They’re far more subtle than Fox News (then again a bazooka is more subtle than Fox News), but that just makes me even more leery of them. When you consider the fact that the CIA has planted stories in foreign papers in the past (Argentina’s during Pinochet’s reign for instance) and the DOD in Iraq more recently why would anyone consider it a stretch to believe that even domestic papers as prestigious as the NYT couldn’t be infiltrated or manipulated?

What’s almost as disturbing as BushCo’s secretive wire taps and subverting existing law is how the NYT simply sat on the fucking story for over a year simply because Bush asked them to!. Another stunning example of the Liberal Media™ in action. Jesus fucking christ.

I read the transcript of the “analysis” that followed. Lehrer, Brooks, and Shields danced around the issues like ballerinas. Media analysts can apparently faun over anything. And Lehrer really dropped the ball by not delving deeper into the New York Times story about Bush giving the NSA the OK to eavesdrop. Weak. And yet Bush still looked callous and clueless.