The melancholy fate that has lately overtaken The New York Times—its militant embrace of political correctness and its surrender to multiculturalist doctrine combined with a general “dumbing down” of its news coverage and the elevation of features on lifestyle, fashion, and pop culture to a priority status—has suddenly and unexpectedly become the subject of a good deal of critical debate and journalistic controversy. The newspaper long regarded as pre-eminent in the annals of American journalism has now achieved, in what many observers believe to be the twilight of the paper’s august history, the dubious distinction of becoming a “story” that on many days of the year is far more interesting, and far more indicative of the malaise afflicting American cultural life, than a large number of the trivial events and fatuous opinions regularly reported in its pages. The Times has always had its critics, of course—and they haven’t always been wrong, either—but what we are witnessing today is something different. There is a growing sense—among journalists, first of all, but also among the middle-class professionals in many fields who still constitute the Times’s core readership—that we are seeing the fall of a great journalistic institution.

This is not to say that the current troubles at the Times are without precedent.

This is not to say that the current troubles at the Times are without precedent. The Timeshas often shown itself to have a weakness for the kind of “progressive” causes of which political correctness