The Devil You Know

Why attacking the Old Grey Lady is bad for the GOP, as per Francis Wilkinson, executive editor of The Week:

"If conservatives were to look up from hammering nails in the Times’ coffin, they might notice that there is a growing web-based journalism infrastructure preparing to supplant their bête noir. It’s an infrastructure that is not only more liberal than the Times but also less inhibited by the paper’s habits of deference to power and concern for open debate and fair play. Having evolved in the era of Bush and Cheney, WMD and torture, much of the new establishment considers the contemporary GOP irredeemable. And unlike the Times, it refuses to treat conservative charges of liberal press bias as anything but a canard. The more damage the Times sustains, the faster this new infrastructure rises to replace it."

The NYT's deference to power can be seen in their inability to use the word torture to describe the Bush/Cheney era. The blogs have no problem with that issue. This “new infrastructure” includes, Wilkinson writes, TPM, HuffPo, EmptyWheel, and Andrew Sullivan.

Source: CJR