Man Without Qualities

Posted 4:43 PM by Robert

Who Does the Times Think It's Fooling?

The New York Times actually ran an editorial today asserting that:

"[T]here has been no stopping efforts by the timber industry and opportunistic politicians to exploit the fires for commercial and ideological gain. The latest and most cynical manifestation of this impulse is a proposal by several Republican senators from Western states to suspend basic environmental laws in order to permit logging on up to 24 million acres of national forest land. The senators describe this as necessary to prevent further fires."

This with no mention whatsoever that, as noted here in a prior post, the Washington Times had already reported:

"Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle quietly slipped into a spending bill language exempting his home state of South Dakota from environmental regulations and lawsuits, in order to allow logging in an effort to prevent forest fires.The move discovered yesterday by fellow lawmakers angered Western legislators whose states were forced to obey those same rules as they battled catastrophic wildfires."

This kind of thing just has to raise questions about the New York Times. Is the intelligence of the editors going down, or is it just the editors' estimation of the intelligence of their readership that's going down? Either way, it's consistent with the Ellis Theory.