And yet, this is not just about who's up and who's down inside the Times. It's also about the very public role the paper plays in American culture and politics. The Augusta dust-up has given additional ammunition to conservative critics who for years, even decades, have crusaded against the Times' alleged liberal bias. They paint the spiked columns as proof that Raines has handed out liberal, social-justice directives on hot topics, and that reporters and editors dare not cross him.

For conservatives eager to score points against the Times, "this is their Chandra Levy, their summer-long crusade," says Tifft.

"The conservative reaction to coverage they don't like is to attack it, and they've been successful," says Alex Jones, a former Times media reporter and Tifft's coauthor on "The Trust."

More importantly, it overlaps with conservatives' claim that the paper's news coverage of the pending war against Iraq has been tilted to the left.

While Democrats in Congress failed to aggressively question White House plans for the war in recent months, the New York Times has not. A series of Page 1 stories raised critical questions about the cost of such a war and what a post-Saddam Iraq would look like. Well-placed sources leaked detailed war plans to the Times, which set off a round of robust debate about whether the paper was being used by either side of the dove/hawk debate raging inside the White House. The public benefited, however, from the insight about war planning -- and about war doubts held by some Pentagon factions.

With coordinated, orchestrated attacks coming from the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and other conservative outlets, the right-wing press unloaded on the Times this summer after it included former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger among prominent Republicans who had broken with Bush on Iraq. In fact, Kissinger supported attacking Iraq, but with several caveats.

The newspaper published a clarification stating that the original article "should have made a clearer distinction" between Kissinger's views and those of other Republicans "with more categorical objections to a military attack." A second article "listed Kissinger incorrectly among Republicans who were warning outright against a war," the clarification said. The misstep may have been relatively minor, particularly in light of the hundreds of articles and columns the Times has published on Iraq this year, but Republican foes pounced.

Writing in the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer announced: "Not since William Randolph Hearst famously cabled his correspondent in Cuba, 'You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war,' has a newspaper so blatantly devoted its front pages to editorializing about a coming American war as has Howell Raines's New York Times."

At the Cal Berkeley symposium, Raines laughed off the accusation: "Charles took leave of his senses." But that has hardly mollified the critics.

"I think that because of things the Times has done recently, from the war coverage to Augusta, where the paper has an almost inarguable agenda, it's much easier for conservatives to make their case about a bias," says National Review Online's Lowry. "You can probably go to a cocktail party and say the New York Times is biased and not necessarily be laughed out of the room, compared to one year ago."

Jones, who runs Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Media Center, dismisses the argument that the Times is biased. "I don't think conservatives have a leg to stand on."

Still, that accusation has larger implications as the war over alleged media bias, both from the left and right, heats up. Both former President Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore have recently bemoaned the Republicans' ability to shape and control the news. Clinton called it a conservative "destruction machine" and suggested that Democrats were badly outgunned in the press.

"I think the left should be jealous," says Steve Rendall, a senior analyst for the liberal advocacy group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. "The larger emerging story of media bias is that some Democrats and liberals are starting to wake up to the conservative echo chamber -- the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh -- and that it has tremendous impact on politics."

While the Washington Post in recent years has moved to the right politically, Lyons says, "the New York Times is the largest target that can reasonably be called the liberal press. And there's an orchestrated campaign against them now."

Sulzberger conceded as much from the stage in Berkeley. "It's a time when people are polarized, when legitimate debate gives way to demonizing your enemies," he said. "And we're seeing it play out in the far-right press and we're seeing it play out in the far-left press of this county. And we are not benefiting as a society from it. As journalists, part of their mandate is to deliver the news and it's rarely good news. And it's often easier to kill the messenger than try to understand what the message is."

The problem is that while critics are out hunting the messenger, the Times keeps giving them fresh ammunition.

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