That's some of the silliest sh!t I ever heard.
Well, perhaps you need to broaden your reading material.
Besides, FoxNews shares the same view on delegate count.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/07/romney-builds-delegate-lead-with-super-tuesday-wins/
27 posted on Friday, March 09, 2012 12:54:56 AM by Mariner: “That's some of the silliest sh!t I ever heard.”
Okay, today gets to be my day to make some of my fellow conservatives mad.
I've read the New York Times for many, many years. It **IS** the agenda-setting newspaper in Washington on both sides of the aisle. Liberals read it because they like and agree with it. Most conservative leaders read it (or have their staff read it and give them clippings and/or summaries of key stories) because they need to understand why liberals think the way they do, because they need to see the strategy and planning being discussed by liberals, and because once a subject hits the New York Times, it will be part of the national agenda being covered by lots of other news media.
I realize lots of conservatives outside Washington do not read the New York Times. However, a huge amount of what we read in more conservative media outlets is written because it's responding to something the New York Times investigated that nobody else was covering effectively on the national level, or the New York Times found out about something somebody else was covering and placed on the national media agenda something that was previously a fairly minor story. Speaking for myself, I'd like to read the article that started the ball rolling to get an early warning of what we're going to face.
I've seen that personally with a story I was covering back in the 1990s that was getting a lot of attention in the local news media and denominationally-related church media. The New York Times got wind of the story, sent their reporter out, ran a front-page story, and suddenly it was front-and-center on everybody’s agenda who had reason to be interested. That happens every day on a regular basis — if the New York Times considers something newsworthy, everybody else on that news beat starts paying attention. They set the agenda for lots of other media, and that sets the agenda for lots of people in politics.
Beyond that, the New York Times still spends large amounts of money doing investigative work. Lots of that investigative work really **IS** good shoe-leather, document-reading, fact-checking stuff that benefits the political process. I see that even here locally outside a military installation in rural Missouri — the New York Times covers stories about military appropriations and defense policy that nobody else is covering, and that I need to know because it has direct impact on the future of Fort Leonard Wood.
My main problem with the New York Times is not that it does what it does, but that no conservative newspaper exists doing the same thing. Yes, they have a bias. Who doesn't? But when nobody else is doing the job, they're the only game in town.
Like it or not, and I definitely do not like it, there simply is no other newspaper in the United States that has the influence of the New York Times for a general market. The Wall Street Journal does in its narrow focus of economic and business coverage (which has political implications, of course), but other than business coverage, the New York Times is still the leading newspaper of record for the Washington political scene.