[livianne]

I never did like the NYT, even when i was much younger and didn't have much of a political leaning. My parents are fairly liberal (not off the edge liberal, but a little bit bleeding heart) and they always insisted that the NYT was the paper that any person wanting to be educated should read. It seems that people believing themselves to be highly intellectual are therefore induced to believe and follow anything told to them in such a highly intellectual format. Sort of an Emporor's new clothes thing - there's truly no substance, but they can't asmit there is nothing there, or they risk losing their intellectual status.

[thucydides]

Bingo, you've got it in what your parents said. I believe most NY Times readers are people with some intellectual pretensions but who do not really think issues through carefully on their own. They see the Times as furnishing a source of authoritative socially acceptable opinions in the "right circles." I don't know how many times I have seen reasonably intelligent people repeating some utterly absurd thing that they have obviously picked up from the Times and accepted without stopping to think. In biblical times, "shibboleths" were passwords used for identification. So too in modern times - positions on issues are used primarily to signal one's membership in the group of good right thinking people. It is pure narcissism - "we agree to these things, we are with the good people who are sophisticated and thoughtful - not like those simple people with bad motives who betray themselves by admitting they diffently about certain issues." In fact, uncritical readership of the Times has become the badge of membership in the class of shallow intellectual wannabes who are in fact profoundly anti-intellectual without realizing it.