The NYT's First Public Editor Cheers on Obama at Lefty Huffington Post
Daniel Okrent, who was the Times' first "public editor," has a post cheering on Barack Obama at the liberal Huffington Post. It's a mostly clinical analysis suggesting that the so-called Bradley Effect is overstated and that racism won't hurt Obama in the election. Okrent does hew to liberal conventional wisdom in his analysis of the Tennessee Senate race involving Rep. Harold Ford, a black Democrat:
Republicans ran an ad, right before Election Day, suggesting that Ford had a taste for white women.
In his HuffPo bio, Okrent is identified as being "thrilled he no longer has to be impartial." Funny thing is, of the three public editors employed by the Times thus far, Okrent was the most open to arguments about the paper's liberal bias. He even titled a July 2004 column, "Is the New York Times a liberal newspaper?" Okrent answered that rhetorical question in his first line: "Of course it is."
