Weinergate and Sarah Palin have dominated this space the last couple of days, but another story with major media implications is that Jill Abramson will replace Bill Keller as the New York Times executive editor beginning September 6th.  The headlines have been boasting that Abramson is the Times‘ first female boss since the paper’s inception, but this shake-up is hardly progressive: Abramson was raised in New York, is Harvard educated, has little new media expertise (if any), and has a long history of liberal bias in her reports.  She’s a daughter of the old, biased, liberal MSM.

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto was quick to point out this incredible excerpt from the NYT article announcing the change:

Ms. Abramson said that as a born-and-raised New Yorker, she considered being named editor of The Times to be like “ascending to Valhalla.”

“In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion,” she said. “If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.“

Scary.

Taranto then goes on to demonstrate that Abramson has a history of “trying to tear down” the Times‘ competitors, most notably Fox News.

Newsbusters, which has documented dozens of examples of liberal bias in Abramson’s past, focused a post on Abramson’s support of Anita Hill, the one-time Clarence Thomas colleague who bears major responsibility for the fiasco that was Thomas’s SCOTUS confirmation hearings.  (more…)

Back in September, after the Giles-O’Keefe ACORN reveal had blown through the alternative media with Katrina-strength winds, the New York Times‘ public editor, Clark Hoyt (Mr. Collins to the Gray Lady’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh), wondered if just maybe the paper had tuned in a bit late to the story.  Managing editor for news Jill Abramson joined him in the public fret-fest, conceding the Times was “slow off the mark,” blaming “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” Hoyt then disclosed that Abramson and executive editor Bill Keller “would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.”

“Clueless Clark”

Who was this individual assigned by the Times to give them a window on the alien universe of Fox, talk radio and the conservative blogosphere? Keller – the Times‘ transparency and all that — announced he/she would remain anonymous, since he wanted to spare “X” “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

Oh, and here’s how Hoyt concluded his column:  “Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.”

And they say the Times has no comics section! (more…)