Omissions

For the second straight week, New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt devotes a column to claims that the paper's supposedly-inadequate responsiveness to right-wing yelling about ACORN proves that the paper demonstrates liberal bias. This time, Hoyt's hook is reader response to his previous column.

This latest column does show some improvement: This time, Hoyt went to the trouble of acknowledging that not everybody thinks the Times is biased in favor of liberals. That's quite an improvement. Still, glaring flaws remain, most notably that Clark Hoyt has yet again managed to get through an entire column about whether the Times demonstrates liberal bias without using the words “Iraq” or “Gore” or “Whitewater.”

That's a bit like writing a column about whether the Atlantic Ocean is a desert without ever mentioning all the water.