Web Will Make Conservatives Miss the Times

Conservatives have delighted in making a piñata out of the New York Times, but they’re not going to like the post-Times world, writes Francis Wilkinson of The Week. “Like most powerful, entrenched institutions, the Times has a deep bias in favor of the way things are,” he argues, and that’s benefited conservatives. The online journalism system rising to replace it has no such sympathies.

The Times still won’t call waterboarding “torture.” It runs columns by David Brooks. It sat on the story of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping for a year. Can you envision the Huffington Post or Talking Points Memo doing any of that? Those are the sites breaking stories—“conservative sites tend to be short on reporting”—and the more the Times falters, the stronger they become. (More New York Times stories.)