WHY THE NYT IS A JOKE

Chris Hedges, a New York Times reporter, gave a speech at the annual conference of the Association of Opinion Page Editors, in which he blasted his own paper for being insufficiently anti-American and accuses Ariel Sharon of being a war criminal.

A Timesman Goes Ballistic
"We're absolutely reviled around the world, as we should be," Hedges said. "Our only friends are war criminals"--a reference, he explained, to Ariel Sharon and Vladimir Putin.

America's amoral, bloodthirsty ways and the hate they generate would be much plainer to the American people, Hedges said, if only so many journalists weren't "trapped" by the government's war clichés and oriented to a Washington-centric view of the world. This group, he said, included his bosses at the Times.

"There was absolutely no interest in my newspaper in presenting the views of the French" as the U.S. moved toward war in Iraq, Hedges said. Instead, there was lots of guffawing over anti-French jokes, which he termed "racist."