Kudos to to Andrew O'Hehir for his fascinating review of the two recent books examining the Jayson Blair and fake WMD scandals.

I agree with O'Hehir that the fundamental question about the future of the New York Times is " whether it can recover a sense of true impartiality and independence, or whether its editors and managers have become so snuggly with power, so seduced by the corroded political discourse of our time, that they define 'impartiality' as a point of perpetual, semi-neutral waffledom, halfway across the infinitesimal distance between Joe Lieberman and John McCain."

I've sadly concluded it's the latter. Which is why I cancelled my subscription after almost 20 years. I wasn't just in a snit about Jayson Blair or Judith Miller's fake WMD. No, it was the relentless accumulation of bad journalism -- the trumped-up charges against the nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, the over-the-top, panting coverage of Whitewater and later the Monica Lewinsky scandals, the starkly biased standards of coverage for George W. Bush versus Al Gore and later John Kerry, the narrow scope of acceptable ideas on the Op-Ed page, and more.

In the past, I might have been stuck with the Times. I live in Minneapolis, where the NYT pretty much was the monopoly franchise for national and international news. But thanks to the Internet, I can now read a huge variety of news and international reporting and views. Which made the flawed, narrow Times coverage increasing hard to ignore ... or put up with. The Gray Lady, for all her moments of brief, shining glory, has become a tramp. So why pay hundreds of dollars a year to read this ... junk?

In short, I finally stopped trusting what O'Hehir called "the most prestigious brand name in journalism." And apparently, I'm not the only one.

When I called the Times to cancel my subscription, the operator asked why. I mentioned the fake WMD stories and a few other things. She said, "Well, I'll just put down 'Lied about the war,'" leading me to wonder if "Lied about the war" had become a new checkoff box on the cancellation forms, along with wet newspapers and poor delivery service.

-- Lynnell Mickelsen

"Of course, you or I didn't know that when Colin Powell gave his fateful audiovisual presentation to the United Nations in February 2003, he was pretty much pulling it out of his butt." Excuse me? Many of us did. Head over to the Guardian archives and see how other countries -- even our allies -- reported Powell's claims with skepticism and followed up with articles that challenged his evidence.

There was a reason so many of us took to the streets that month. It was not simply a knee-jerk reaction against violence. We knew our government was misleading us, that it was taking advantage of the sudden impotence of the country's mainstream press to do so, and we wanted to show the world that we weren't buying it.

I have no idea why your reviewer would gloss over such evidence in an article condemning the NYT for doing the same thing.

-- Lisa Nosal

The problems at the Times are not a reflection of the misdeeds of individual reporters or editors or even of a particular paper so much as an unsurprising consequence of the nature of journalism itself. Journalists, even honest ones, can't be expected to get at the fundamental failings of their own profession. Just like doctors or lawyers or accountants undertaking the analogous exercise, self-policing journalists inevitably focus on the famous few bad apples and not even the worst bad apples at that. They expect others to share their own parochial interest in the violation of guild rules about sourcing or plagiarism, but they don't hold their own kind to nonprofessional standards that can't be routinely gamed. The fact that bears repeating is that all the papers do a rotten job of conveying relevant truth to the public because that's not their real job at all.

-- Jim Harrison

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