Destroying a great national institution

If you want to understand the disastrous decline of the New York Times in recent years, a good place to start is this National Review Online "Media Blog" post on a commencement speech given by Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. Stephen Spruiell of "Media Blog" links to the text of Sulzberger's speech, so you can read the whole thing if you want. What struck me about the quoted excerpts was their stupidity. This does not seem to be a very smart man. Example:

"It wasn't supposed to be this way," Sulzberger said. "You weren't supposed to be graduating in an America fighting a misbegotten war in a foreign land. You weren't supposed to be graduating into a world where we are still fighting for fundamental human rights, be it the rights of immigrants to start a new life, the right of gays to marry, or the rights of women to choose."

"A misbegotten war in a foreign land"—that's a reference evidently to the liberation of 25 million people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and the installation of democracy and freedom. "The rights of immigrants to start a new life"—as the president is pushing successfully in the Senate for a law that provides for legalization of illegal immigrants. "The rights of women to choose"—as we continue to have every year more than 1 million legal abortions—a word that Sulzberger evidently can't bring himself to utter, preferring instead to use the euphemism favored by one side in the argument over this issue.

For many years, the New York Times has been regarded as the newspaper of record that presents, in the words of its slogan, "all the news that's fit to print." Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. seems to have launched it on a different course, as a partisan journal that shapes the news to advance the ideological goals of its publisher, editors, and reporters. Did his predecessors as publisher—his father, uncle, grandfather, and great-grandfather—ever give public speeches so full of partisan venom? I doubt it. By doing so, he sends yet another signal to the newsroom about the kind of newspaper he wants.