What Barro\u2019s tweet was for me, and Egan\u2019s ope-ed for Alan, was the tipping point. I have been reading the Times as a subscriber for nearly 20 years. It sometimes made me furious, it sometimes thrilled me, it usually made me think, and I was almost always grateful for it. I started my Times subscription in south Florida, kept it when I moved to New York City, held on to it when I moved to Dallas, then in Philly, and stuck with the digital version in St. Francisville. I\u2019ve been with the Times for longer than I\u2019ve known my wife. We have a relationship, that newspaper and I.<\/p>\n
It has never been friendly to conservatives, of course, and that\u2019s just part of the deal. But the Times plays things reasonably straight \u201d\u201d except on coverage of social and religious conservatives. This is not just my view; it\u2019s the unapologetic view of Bill Keller, the former executive editor….<\/p>\n
Even though I care about culture and religion more than anything else, I gritted my teeth and read the paper anyway. It was worth it. Besides, they employ David Brooks and they hired Ross Douthat, and that counts for a lot in my book.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve noticed, though, that as gay rights became more prominent in the public square, and as the Times took on a no-holds-barred advocacy role (it\u2019s not just me saying that; two former NYT ombudsmen have made the same observation; I don\u2019t have the links available to me, but you can easily look it up), it\u2019s attitude toward religious believers anywhere to the right of the Episcopal Church left became increasingly nasty. Now the Times not only didn\u2019t try to be fair, it seemed to go out of its way to be hostile. Look, I expect the Times to give ample coverage to gay issues, given the particular prominence of the gay community in NYC, and among the creative elites the paper keeps its eye on. I\u2019m not sure when it happened, or why it happened, but at some point I started to think that the Times really does hate social and religious conservatives. I mean hate<\/i>.<\/p>\n