He’s got a point, of course. Journalists at the Times throw their liberal biases in all over the place—in movie reviews, in sports stories, even in articles about Norwegian seafood. I read a piece once in the New York Times Magazine that contained this gem: “If you see a whole monkfish at the market, you’ll find its massive mouth scarier than a shark’s. Apparently it sits on the bottom of the ocean, opens its Godzilla jaws and waits for poor unsuspecting fishies to swim right into it, not unlike the latest recipients of W’s capital-gains cuts.”

Does my friend really want to miss out on stuff like this? Where else will he find a story that combines tax cuts, monkfish, and Bush-only-cares-about-rich-people in one very short paragraph?

I, for one, love the biases in the Times. Okay, not the biases per se, but the way the journalists who work at the most important newspaper in the entire galaxy can find ways to jump through hoops and work their biases in. I love how shameless they can be about it; how they think we won’t notice.

My all-time favorite example of ridiculous New York Times PC-ness and shameless hypocrisy all rolled into one is about those cartoons that ran in a Danish newspaper, which mocked the prophet Muhammad. One cartoon showed Muhammad wearing a turban in the shape of a ticking bomb. Another showed him at the gates of heaven telling suicide bombers, “Stop, stop, we have run out of virgins.” This, of course, offended the sensibilities of many Muslims, who immediately tried to prove that theirs is a religion of peace by setting buildings on fire and vandalizing churches. And as the Times reported, “from Gaza to Auckland, imams have demanded execution or amputations for the cartoonists and their publishers.”

This is what we infidels call “irony”—a concept, like tolerance, that means nothing to the homicidal maniacs who inhabit the world of radical Islam.

And even though the Times, like news organizations all over the world, gave plenty of coverage to the story, it never showed the actual cartoons that touched off the violence. On February 7, 2006, in an editorial, the Times explained why.

“The New York Times and much of the rest of the nation’s news media have reported on the cartoons but refrained from showing them,” the editorial said. “That seems a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols, especially since the cartoons are so easy to describe in words.”

I say this not only as a journalist but also as someone who appreciates disingenuousness as much as the next guy: Bull! The cartoons should have been published, so readers would know exactly what touched off the widespread violence in the first place. You learn that in Journalism 101. Still, I understand the paper’s dilemma—up to a point, anyway. No editor wants to needlessly offend people of faith—especially, as the Times says, when it’s so easy to describe the cartoons in words.

So how do we explain a piece that ran in the very same New York Times just one day later? It was an article about the cartoons and “the power of imagery”—about how all kinds of art, through the ages, have provoked all sorts of emotions and reactions, including anger and violence. To illustrate the point, the Times ran a picture of a painting by Chris Ofili, called Holy Virgin Mary, a work of art that touched off a storm of protest when it went on display at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999. Why? Because the painting—a collage—shows the Virgin Mary surrounded by little cutouts from pornographic magazines and shellacked clumps of elephant dung.

So, let’s see if I understand this: Showing the Holy Virgin Mary covered in elephant crap is okay, but showing cartoons that touch off worldwide mayhem would be disrespectful. I ask again: Does my friend who has stopped reading the Times really want to miss out on so much hypocrisy and other fun?

But let’s pretend to take the New York Times seriously and ask a few questions: What about that editorial the Times ran just twenty-four hours earlier, about how the paper doesn’t believe in “gratuitous assaults on religious symbols”? What about the high-minded stuff about how there’s no need to show pictures when the images “are so easy to describe in words”? Why, when all is said and done, is it okay to show a piece of art that offends Christians but not a cartoon that offends Muslims?

The answer is simple. Radical Muslims are demented. When they get angry they either blow something up or cut somebody’s head off. Christians, on the other hand, are fairly rational. When they protest they usually do it within reasonable parameters. So Muslims must be pandered to while Christians are fair game. No one will ever get into serious trouble for mocking Christianity or maligning its most sacred symbols.

So despite what the Times says, this isn’t about respect. It’s about fear. Fear that if the Times ran the cartoons, some of those radical Muslims might actually blow up the Times building. In the end, the powers that be at the New York Times, who I’m sure fancy themselves courageous journalists, simply gave in to raw intimidation. The Times should have adhered to its own journalistic philosophy: give the reader as much information as possible. Run the cartoons and the picture of the Virgin Mary. In other words: Report the news!

And even if the mighty New York Times didn’t have the courage to fess up to the obvious, one newspaper did, an alternative paper called the Boston Phoenix. Like virtually every other news outfit in America, the Phoenix decided not to publish the cartoons. But at least its editors were willing to tell the truth, explaining that they didn’t run them…

Give the Phoenix credit for being honest, and for not hiding behind self-serving fairy tales about decency and journalistic responsibility.

An online column called “The Ethics Scoreboard” got it exactly right: “In the end, it may be that the most significant impact of the Danish cartoons was not the violence it unleashed or the cultural divide it exposed but how it revealed the pitiful lack of integrity, responsibility and courage among America’s journalistic elite.”

My friend, the one who stopped reading the Times, tells me that he agrees with every word. Still I recently asked him to reconsider. I tried to convince him that reading the paper really shouldn’t make him angry. It should make him laugh. Shameless and clueless can be quite amusing, I assured him.

“No way,” he replied. “If this were some paper in Podunk, I wouldn’t give a damn. But the New York Times has tremendous influence. Powerful people who make important decisions read it and believe what they read. They give it respect. The Times, as much as I hate to say it, has enormous impact on our lives.”

Unfortunately, he’s got a point. Now it’s my head that is about to explode.

You can tell what a newspaper thinks is important by what it puts on the front page, and by how many times it puts it there. Take Abu Ghraib. The New York Times so far has run more than sixty page-one stories about how American soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners at that prison. And when the story broke in 2004, the Times ran thirty-two front-page Abu Ghraib stories—on thirty-two consecutive days! So, if you can tell what a newspaper thinks is important by what it puts on the front page, and by how many times it puts it there, to the editors of the New York Times, Abu Ghraib must be one of the most important stories of all time.

Let’s not ignore the elephant in the room. Thirty-two page-one stories, day in and day out for more than a month, is not simply news coverage. It’s a crusade. And no matter how honestly and objectively those stories were reported, together they amount to an editorial, masquerading as straight news.

With Abu Ghraib, the Times found new angles to report every day. The paper ran stories on the accusations…on the president’s reaction…on how an officer suggested the abuse was encouraged…on command errors that aided the abuse…on how an Iraqi recounted the abuse by U.S. soldiers…on how the American guards at Abu Ghraib brought anguish to the unit’s home in the United States…on an American soldier who was a “picture of pride” but became a “symbol of abuse”…on the connection between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and how “ill-prepared” and “overwhelmed” our soldiers are over there…on the trials of the accused American soldiers, which were about to begin…on the American head of the inquiry…on an Afghan’s account of U.S. abuse…on prison policies that led to abuse…on a whistle-blower who “paints [a] scene of eager mayhem”…on another jail that served as an “incubator for abuses in Iraq”…on how the accused soldiers “try to shift blame in prison abuse”…on and on and on and on.

And those were just fifteen of the stories, just fifteen of more than sixty. It takes a lot of talent and enterprise to come up with so many stories covering so many different angles. So where, I wonder, was that same talent and enterprise, that same passion in trying to find just a few stories about the two young soldiers mutilated beyond recognition by the terrorists in Iraq? How did their buddies remember them? Did they leave sweethearts back home? I guess we’ll never know, since the Times ran only one other article: a side-bar that appeared on the same day the paper reported the bodies had been recovered, about how both men were “Determined to Serve Country, and Willing to Face Danger,” as the headline on page eight put it.

The Times is always telling us about the magnificent lives of people they find so fascinating, like those terribly important people who design handbags, and the ones who act in third-rate plays in dingy theaters way, way off Broadway. Don’t two young American soldiers who died fighting for their country deserve the same respectful attention? But then these soldiers weren’t sophisticated people. They didn’t go to college. One even dropped out of high school. “Not our kind of people, or our readers’ kind of people,” you can practically hear the elitists saying at the New York Times.

But in reality we don’t expect the Times to run sixty stories about these two brave soldiers the way it has run hundreds of stories about U.S. soldiers who embarrass their country. American valor never seems to interest the people who run America’s “newspaper of record” even one-tenth as much as American dishonor does. In fact, from the New York Times we get precious few stories about anything good our soldiers do, and hardly any stories about American heroism.

I’d like to read more about those two young guys, and I sure as hell would like to read more about their killers. What makes some Muslims do such savage things in the name of their religion? Christians don’t do these things. Jews don’t, either. What is it about some of these Muslims that makes them different? Is it their holy book, their Koran? How did they become so dark, so absent of civilized values? I could handle thirty-two stories in thirty-two days, answering some of those questions!

But the editors of the New York Times, and many other liberals as well, are far more interested in Americans’ misdeeds than in those of the terrorists. When the insurgents who killed those two young soldiers, for example, posted a video on the Internet, showing the mutilated corpses drenched in blood, the decapitated body of one of the soldiers with h...