The New York Times admits it has a liberal bias.

I'll get to the politics-and-policy issues this fall (I want to watch the campaign coverage before I conclude anything), but for now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

Bully for Daniel Okrent, the paper's ombudsman, for writing this column. He states at the end that he's going on vacation now; will he have a job to come back to afterwards?

Most of the ink spilled here is devoted to social issues, where my own viewpoint actually isn't that far from the Times. (Except that, for some bizarre reason, the gun issue seems to track closely with social conservatism. Which makes absolutely no sense to me: shouldn't it be obvious that the solution to, for instance, gay-bashing, is for gays to pack heat?)

I'm far more interested (now) in Okrent's take on political coverage, especially in what promises to be an spectacularly shrill campaign... in which, for instance, theft of an entire Time-Life set of Top Secret codeword documents by a former Clinton official is somehow construed as a sign of Bush's perfidy.