The NY Times has been spewing lies and propaganda since at least the 1930s, when Walter Duranty fabricated reports from Russia stating how the news leaking out about millions deliberately starved to death and executed were greatly exaggerated. After all, some eggs will be broken when a great man like Stalin is buy making the utopian omlet. As I understand it, Duranty’s name still disgraces the masthead - his Pulitzer Prize has never been revoked either. The Times, and th Sulzberger’s (the owners) are the moral equivalent of holocaust deniers.

[… tipping hat and raising glass to Mr. Auster …]

In case any of the innumerable commentators on the scandal (who can read them all?) hasn’t made this point, I should like to call attention to one more kind of hypocrisy on the Left as it tries to find someone to blame. Most elite colleges and universities have been teaching “deconstructionism” to their students for a generation. According to that doctrine there is no such thing as objective truth. There isn’t even such a thing as a “text”; each reader contributes his own meaning to the black scratches on the page. I don’t know whether Blair imbibed this pernicious doctrine in college, but my point is that his and The Times’s explainers-away, and even their critics who are doctrinaire liberals, are all sympathetic to the value-relativism/deconstructionism doctrine. How then can they assert that a reporter can falsify “objective facts”? How can he plagiarize another reporter’s article, since each reader can impute different meanings to both the “original text” and the “copy”? Moreover, those are the very people who instruct us that we should not be “judgmental.” How can they then say that what Blair and Raines did is “wrong”? Could it be that they never really believed in those doctrines? Oh, I’m so confused!

“Moreover, those are the very people who instruct us that we should not be ‘judgmental.’ How can they then say that what Blair and Raines did is ‘wrong’?”

They do it by means of the unprincipled exception, the necessary method of government under the liberal order. Liberalism says that there is no truth and that we should not be judgmental; in other words, liberalism is nihilism. But such nihilism, if followed consistently, in incompatible with earthly existence. So when the nihilism goes “too far”and starts to threaten the functioning of liberal institutions, the liberals are forced, against their own preferences, to start saying that there are truths that matter and moral principles that must be enforced. In asserting the reality of truth, they are making an unprincipled exception from their own nihilism.