Thank God For The Blogosphere...

...Or the following columns in the New York Times would go uncorrected. The "Paper of Record", which at one point represented the triumph of objective journalism over the subjective, yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst in the first half of the 20th century, has now reduced itself to the equivalent of its Hearstian nemesis. Sad. Some examples:

• Paul Krugman on September 2: “Katrina hit five days ago ... Thousands of Americans are dead or dying ... ”
  
• Associated Press, October 3: “As of Friday, the state health department reported 932 deaths in Louisiana from Hurricane Katrina.”
• 
  Maureen Dowd on September 3: “America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning.”
  
• New York Times, September 29: “... the most alarming stories that coursed through the city appear to be little more than figments of frightened imaginations, the product of chaotic circumstances that included no reliable communications, and perhaps the residue of the longstanding raw relations between some police officers and members of the public.”

This website gives many, many more examples of the Times yellow journalism, and its not just confined to the op-ed page. It's all over but the shouting as far as the Times is concerned. It's credibility is in tatters, and since there are so many more (read: internet) news outlets out there, the Times will not, in all likelihood, ever get its credibility back, much less the readership that has given up on it....such as me.