By Patrick Appel
Matt Pressman tries to figure out why people love to hate the NYT. Amid the bashing is Slate press critic Jack Shafer's semi-defense of the newspaper:
“What newspaper do they think does a better job? If you go to the library and start cranking through the microfilm of 30-year-old New York Timeses, I think you’ll quickly realize that it’s a more lively, more intelligent newspaper than it was 30 years ago. And it wasn’t a bad paper then. Does the paper aggravate, does it contradict itself? Yeah, but it’s a huge, huge monster. It’s on practically every continent every day, and our expectations of The New York Times are huge, as they should be.”