"Deference To Power"

Francis Wilkinson, executive editor of The Week, writes:

If conservatives were to look up from hammering nails in the Times’ coffin, they might notice that there is a growing web-based journalism infrastructure preparing to supplant their b e noir. It’s an infrastructure that is not only more liberal than the Times but also less inhibited by the paper’s habits of deference to power and concern for open debate and fair play. Having evolved in the era of Bush and Cheney, WMD and torture, much of the new establishment considers the contemporary GOP irredeemable. And unlike the Times, it refuses to treat conservative charges of liberal press bias as anything but a canard. The more damage the Times sustains, the faster this new infrastructure rises to replace it.

Some of us, for example, are unafraid to use the word torture to describe torture. The NYT's shift on this came entirely under the Bush administration. There is no other explanation for it other than deference to power and fear of being Roved.