New York Times Takes A Stance Wider Than Obama

The Times prints its own virulent, violent rhetoric while condemning much milder stuff from Fox News.

Thomas Edsall, who blogs for the New York Times, opens a post today with a violent metaphor:

“Right now, before everyone gets to know him, is the time for Obama to push Romney face down in the dirt,” a key Democratic operative working outside the campaign told me last week. “You can’t let Romney go before the voters looking clean.”

What Obama lacks right now, however, is a bludgeon–a super PAC loaded with cash to hammer home negative advertising. Super PACs, as you may have heard, have emerged as the hit men of 2012.

Remember when the New York Times was complaining about violent uncivil rhetoric? Oh, but that was only on the right.

Meanwhile, here’s Bill Keller, until recently, the lead editor of the Times:

My gripe against Fox is not that it is conservative. The channel’s pulpit-pounding pundits, with the exception of the avuncular Mike Huckabee, are too shrill for my taste, but they are not masquerading as impartial newsmen. Nor am I indignant that Fox News is the cultural home of the Republican Party and a nonstop Obama roast. Partisan journalism, while not my thing, has a long tradition. [Which the Times occasionally comes clean about participating in, at least in its all-too-rare more honest moments -- Ed] Though I do wonder if the folks at Fox appreciate that this genre is more European than American.

My complaint is that Fox pretends very hard to be something it is not, and in the process contributes to the corrosive cynicism that has polarized our public discourse.

Good thing the Times has bludgeoned off all of its own corrosive cynicism.