The paper’s dedication to covering the city of New York is admirable, but so far it seems to have translated merely into tedious stories about recycling, union votes and TV antenna construction. (Week 2 did see more substantive local offerings from the Sun, focusing on Board of Education issues.) The fact is the Sun pays less attention to the city than its well-established competitors. Instead, the paper uses up its measly 12 pages each day carrying lots of national and international stories, most of which are wire copy. On Thursday, for instance, the Sun’s AP wire was working overtime, producing 24 of the paper’s stories, while the Sun’s lean, 12-person editorial staff produced eleven.

Not surprisingly, there were some opening-week blunders, one of which was on par with those back-page howlers in the Columbia Journalism Review. On Friday, some readers of the Sun’s business page might have thought Pamela Anderson had somehow fallen afoul of the Justice Department, with a photo of the former “Baywatch” babe placed near a headline that read “Talks Between Anderson, Justice Dept. Collapse.” The Sun, of course, meant “Andersen,” as in Arthur Andersen. Pamela, it turned out on closer inspection, was simply appearing at a TNN party.

And the new kid on the newspaper block might be forgiven for a bit of shameless self-promotion in a Wednesday story headlined “Sun Shines At NYT Co. Annual Meeting; Times Publisher Says He’s ‘Worried.’” Really? Did Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who oversees a newspaper with a circulation of 1.2 million, actually say he was specifically “worried” about the upstart Sun? It turns out that Sulzberger simply remarked that he “was worried about the competition” — as is every publisher in America.

The Sun was bedeviled by a number of other unfortunate kinks during Week 1. Thursday’s Page 1 piece about an Iranian dissident on the run in Germany proved to be a head-scratcher. Luckily for whoever wrote the story, his or her byline was omitted. Or does somebody want to step forward and claim credit for these two nut-graf sentences? “The dissident, a lawyer and Shiite Muslims cleric named Mehdi Haery, told the New York Sun that he was visited by a man with a briefcase loaded with a knife, brass knuckles and an electric shock device, who said Mr. Haery had been sentenced to death by the Iranian justice ministry. The Bundeskriminalamt, Germany’s federal police responsible for anti-terror operations, took the visitor away, but then asked Mr. Haery to go underground, because Germany’s interests in Iran were very delicate and Mr. Haery shouldn’t endanger them, according to Mr. Haery’s account.”

And then there was the Sun’s ongoing conundrum over who really reps British novelist Zadie Smith. Last Tuesday, in a passable piece about the demise of the solid-metal Rolodex, the Sun interviewed “Andrew Wiley, who represents such authors as Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie.” As Wednesday’s correction box pointed out, “Andrew Wylie is the name of the literary agent who represents Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie. A story that began on the front page of yesterday’s Sun spelled his last name incorrectly.” But then in Thursday’s correction box came this: “Georgia Garrett is the name of the literary agent who represents author Zadie Smith. A story that began on the front page of Tuesday’s Sun and a correction that ran in this space yesterday misidentified Ms. Smith’s agent.”

Got that?

The liveliest part of last week’s Sun was the breezy, always-entertaining, 100-word DailyCandy fashion and arts column. Alas, readers can simply go to Dailycandy.com and read it for free.

The Sun’s most glaring flaw, though, is its sense of news judgment. On Friday the paper went big with a story about an Arab student at New York University who received an award, according to the school, “for her efforts in raising consciousness about issues of concern to the Arab community.” (Hers was one of more than 100 given out by NYU.) The news hook? A pro-Israel group at NYU called TorchPac had opposed the award because last fall the student posted a Web article, by white supremacist David Duke, that was critical of Israel. At the time, the Arab student asserted she didn’t know who Duke was, and she quickly took it down when informed. Nonetheless, TorchPac accused the student of being anti-Semitic.

That’s front-page, above-the-fold news for a New York daily? Some NYU students couldn’t fathom why. Posting a letter on Jim Romenesko’s MediaNews, Brandt Gassman, the news editor for the Washington Square News, NYU’s campus daily, wrote that the Sun story “smack[ed] of (an anti-) Palestinian witch hunt on the part of The Sun’s editors. I fail to comprehend how a dumb mistake made seven months ago by one NYU student warrants front page play in that paper.” In addition, Gassman told Salon, “It struck us [at WSN] as a blatantly political article.”

The Sun’s president and editor, Seth Lipsky, recently told an interviewer that he wanted the Sun’s editorial page to champion “limited government, individual liberty, constitutional fundamentals, equality under the law, economic growth … standards in literature and culture, education.” But the paper’s primary passions are clearly Israel and Jewish causes. Lipsky once edited the Forward, the New York Jewish daily newspaper, and has been described by the New Yorker as a “Jabotinskyite Zionist.” The Sun’s worldview was summed up on launch day in an unsigned editorial, “The War Against the Jews.” Decrying anti-Semitism, “a virus that has claimed millions of lives over the centuries,” the editorial drew a parallel between the Holocaust and recent pro-Palestinian demonstrations held in America, because they “are by and large rallies that support an anti-Semitism that is unthinkable to those who know the history.”

Elsewhere in the Sun’s limited news hole last week, there were stories about Jewish book awards, a synagogue cantor facing sexual assault charges, Jean-Marie Le Pen wooing Jews in France, an upcoming book about Anne Frank, additional editorials about Israel, as well as ads purchased by the Anti-Defamation League, Peace4israel.com and the Zionist Organization of America. And of course there was plenty of coverage of the violence in the Middle East. The Sun reported on Page 1 last Thursday that by backing a U.N. resolution, “Austria, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain and Sweden are throwing their support behind the PLO’s terrorist attack on Israeli civilians.”

The next day a Sun headline reported that U.S. “Taxpayers Send $92 Million More to Palestinians.” The accompanying article explained that the White House had waived restrictions on aid to Palestinians, but it never explained where the $92 million figure came from. In fact, the figure never even appeared in the article. A related editorial suggested the White House waiver “will open the way for something like $100 million in taxpayer funding to make its way to the Palestinians.”

Whether it’s $100 million or $92 million, needless to say, the Sun’s editors didn’t think the Palestinian aid was wise. But the editorial’s anti-Palestinian rhetoric was extreme by the standards of the mainstream press: “Years from now, students of history are going to look back on the American funding of the Palestinian Authority the way they look back now on, say, the collaboration of the Swiss banks with the enemy in World War II.”

The Sun’s debut made a splash in New York’s self-obsessed media waters. The paper has already inspired two critical Web sites, the Smarter New York Sun and Like Father, Like Sun. But whether or not the slim, narrowly focused paper can find a sizable readership in the city’s media-drenched market remains doubtful. If the paper doesn’t show marked improvement soon, that $20 million investment will have purchased a pricey footnote in New York’s corpse-littered newspaper history.

Editor’s Note: This article has been corrected since it was first published.

But now I have a case that’s very clear for Mr. Brisbane: the Times’ story on Rick Santorum’s lies (yes, I call them lies) about John F. Kennedy’s 1960 religion speech, headlined “Santorum Makes Case for Religion in Public Square.” Since it’s the New York Times and all, I don’t expect the paper to call it a “lie.” But the story contains not one word suggesting that Santorum might be, I don’t know, misrepresenting, misremembering, distorting or otherwise being completely wrong about what JFK actually said.

I’m getting a lot of credit on Twitter and Facebook today for my piece, but this is one of those rare times when I’d rather not be recognized, because – don’t tell my editors – what I did was easy. It took me exactly 10 seconds to Google JFK’s speech and another few minutes to read it. Then I cut and pasted Santorum’s comments next to JFK’s and voila, kids, I had a story. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart credited me with a “deep-dive,” and I appreciate the praise, but really, I barely got my feet wet. (The Post’s own news story wasn’t any better than the Times’; Capehart was the first person on staff to note Santorum’s distortion more than 24 hours after it aired on ABC’s “This Week.”)

I assumed I’d be late to the Santorum story because I was sick yesterday and didn’t even watch him live, I just heard about his remarks online. But I’m writing a book about the Democratic Party and Irish Catholics, and as you’d expect, there’s a little bit about Kennedy in there, and so I thought I’d take a moment to explain what Kennedy said – and how rabid anti-Catholicism, as late as 1960, made it necessary.

I made a comment last week in passing that I’d like to elaborate on here: I’ve spent a lot of time, in the book as well as on Salon, pointing out the anti-Catholic Nativism that hobbled my people and that accounts for some of our pugilism, shall we say, in the public square. But Santorum makes me realize I haven’t said enough about why some people were and still are suspicious of Catholics. His disrespectful comments about mainline Protestant churches somehow being agents of Satan is just one example of the contempt for other faiths that has gotten us in trouble over the years. I came of age after Vatican II; my parents were devout Catholic ecumenicists, attending seders at our local Jewish temple and telling the neighbors, no, we’re not supposed to blame Jews for killing Jesus anymore, and Protestants love Jesus, too. Santorum is an example of the mind-set that liberal Catholics and lapsed Catholics have been fighting in my lifetime, and he’s really a disgrace.

I don’t expect the New York Times to call him a disgrace in its news pages, but I do expect the paper to do a minimum of fact-checking, to see whether our first and only Catholic president actually said what Santorum attributes to him. There was a reserved, respectful, Timesian way to do it, and the paper missed an opportunity to reassure its readers that the paper is all about the truth, and that it’s not cowed into printing untruths by the GOP culture warriors who’ve spent decades now insisting the Times has a raging liberal bias.

I don’t mean to single out Michael Barbaro, either, who does good work, or the team of writers the Times lists as providing additional reporting at the end of the piece. Or Kit Seelye, who wrote the earlier Caucus post, on a tighter deadline, about Santorum’s remarks without fact-checking the JFK claim. I’ve always loved the singular way the paper almost always attributes mistakes, in its Corrections column, to “editing errors.” This was an editing error. Someone at some point should have said, “Hey, I know you’re on deadline – but what did JFK actually say?” It’s not vigilantism. It’s journalism.

You’re welcome, Mr. Brisbane.

He could have coasted on his one great advantage — fluency in Arabic — to beat other reporters to the story. He did not. He used it as a foundation to serve readers — and help colleagues. When I left Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam, a sizeable part of my heart was left behind with new friends who were struggling to make the country a better place. Amid the constant shifts in the chaotic post-war era, Anthony’s dispatches were the ones I relied on to give me the complete picture of what was happening around the country.

American reporters are trained to be objective. It is an ideal to aspire to, more than an achievable goal. We are human beings and those of us who cover conflicts have our emotions challenged every day. The desire to bear witness and to make readers and listeners feel what we feel is overwhelming. Sometimes this gets in the way of objectivity. Anthony, who saw more terrible things than most, managed to stay closer to that ideal than any one. That’s what makes his reporting the best and why in years to come, it will truly be seen as the first draft of history.

We published books on Iraq at the same time and shared a panel at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. on Iraq. I had long since decided that objectivity was getting in the way of my reporting. It was important to let my readers know that I was angry and that my friend had died because of the criminally poor planning of the bigwigs in Washington. That emotion suffused my book. Anthony’s book was scrupulously written, you could never guess what he felt about the war.

My memory is that during the course of the conversation I pressed him about keeping his feelings about the war out of the book. He came back at me with full vigor, eloquently defending the importance of objectivity. He was a big-hearted, supremely talented man — and disciplined about the work. The panel was recorded by C-Span and you can watch Anthony and get some sense of who he was and what we have lost here.

Brooks’ criticism is dead on. Letting every person with a “mic check” suggest a fundamental strategy for the movement is a recipe for disaster. Not only have existing intellectual traditions been the product of superior minds, they have stood the test of time. Anyway, how to act collectively when everyone is pursuing his own quixotic dream?

Of course, anyone who follows the debate knows the left must beware of Brooks bearing gifts. The Times’ conservative columnist is always making sensible sounding suggestions to the left, which, upon closer examination, turn out to be ticking bombs. In this case, the right has a perfectly good foundation in the libertarian tradition, Brooks reports. So it doesn’t need to reinvent its first principles .

For his friends on the left, however,  Brooks advises a simple reversion to their philosopher, Karl Marx. Now there’s a thought.  When the centrist Democrats of the filibuster-bound Senate passed a healthcare plan modeled on the Republican scheme from Massachusetts, the Republicans branded their leaders as socialists, or worse, as taking their beliefs from Paris, if not Nairobi. Imagine if they started actually quoting Karl Marx.

Fortunately, should the left be capable of giving up its endlessly proliferating individual belief systems, two schools of thought other than the return to the specter of communism would be available to them.  There is a robust utilitarian tradition, represented most recently in the work of Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, that asks people to rise to the demands of altruism. As a matter of ordinary morality, you’d pause on a walk to pull a drowning child out of a pond, Singer begins. Why would you not give up a trivial expensive treat to rescue someone starving in Africa?

Or, closer to home, living in a shelter somewhere in New York, or in Washington’s McPherson Square. The well-worked-out analysis of Singer’s argument for beneficence is a vastly better foundation for a long-term social movement than any of the slogans on OWS placards. “Tax the rich” is catchy, but dissolves when confronted with Brooks’ comrades’ libertarian first principle: “It’s my money.” Singer offers the opportunity to argue about why keeping every last penny of it when others are in real need is, well, immoral.

Another great 20th century philosopher, the late John Rawls, made a very well-worked-out argument for why it’s not “your money” at all. It’s only your money, as citizens of many less well-favored societies than the United States know, if other people are willing to refrain from killing you to get it. Otherwise, life is, famously, “solitary, POOR, nasty, brutish and short.” Rawls set forth elaborate conditions for when societies agree to let the rich keep the money without having to live behind walls topped with ground glass.

Most important, Rawls posits, inequality must also benefit the people on the bottom, e.g., by expanding the size of the pie. This was the case for much of American history, and the society was the better for it. But now that finance has replaced manufacturing as the engine of the economy, not so much. The endless claims of money movers like Mitt Romney that they are “creating jobs” reflects the deep power of Rawls’ construct. If they’re not, what is he doing with all that money? Rich people’s claims to be complying with Rawls’ condition can only go on so long in face of the robust evidence to the contrary.

Brooks is right about one thing: Ideas matter. The resurrected right has relied on the power of libertarian ideas for decades. During the same period, the left has relied on mic checks and bumper stickers (“the audacity of hope”). When we see them start to use the rich store of liberal thinking available to them, David Brooks, watch out.

These pieces were clearly written with a very specific objective in mind: to draw media attention to the supposed “education crisis” in America — a favorite topic of these publications’ elite readers, who have a vested interest in blaming the recession on the poor rather than on the economic policies that enrich the already rich. No doubt, both the Times and the Atlantic achieved their goal, with various NPR shows, cable gabfests and elite magazines spending the last week frothing over the articles’ central thesis.

The tragedy in all of this is that in both the articles and in most of the discussions that followed, few bothered to question the fundamental assumptions about education in America — and fewer still bothered to ask if “education” in the modern parlance has now become a synonym for “acquiescence.”

To see how this linguistic shift is occurring, reread the Times article with a critical eye. Specifically, notice that after the reporters structure their piece around Apple executives’ (unchallenged) claim that “the U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” there’s not a single shred of proof — empirical or otherwise — offered in support of that assertion. On the contrary, after a sweeping declaration at the top of the piece that wage and human rights differences between Chinese and American workers have little to do with offshoring, the article inadvertently goes on to prove those differentials — not skill levels and education — are the driving force behind the domestic job losses in America.

In one section of the piece, for example, the Times notes that Apple’s big Chinese factory, Foxconn, attracts American investment because “over a quarter of (the) work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day” — and “many work six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant.” In another section of the piece, the Times notes that the cost of “building a $1,500 computer in (California) was $22 a machine … In Singapore, it was $6 … In Taiwan, $4.85.” While the Times unquestioningly forwards Apple’s impossible-to-believe explanation for these figures (“wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities”), the statistics are yet more proof that wage differences, not education, are the real offshoring motive.

The Times also quotes an Apple executive saying the company must outsource because “the entire supply chain is in China now” — and though the article doesn’t bother to mention it, that is true precisely because other factories in that supply chain have moved to China for the cheap wages and lax human rights/labor regulations. The Times later talks to Eric Saragoza, an American worker laid off by Apple, who says that Apple told him to keep his job he didn’t need to acquire more skills, but instead “to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays.” And in another part of the piece, the Times quotes a former Apple executive who insists Apple was forced to move to China because there’s no “U.S. plant (that) can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms” — an admission, again, that Apple’s move to offshore isn’t about skills, but about a desire to employ a “flexible” (read: exploitable) workforce.*

In light of all this, the absurdity of the Times’ “education crisis” conclusion is obvious. Somehow, Dickensian realities are meticulously recounted, but Apple is permitted to plead helplessness without so much as a contradictory fact being mentioned — as if the company isn’t making calculated choices that are generating record profits off sweatshop conditions. China’s super-low wages and nonexistent labor, environmental and human rights protections are shown over and over again to be the driving force behind American corporate offshoring, and yet the conclusion is nonetheless that the problem for America is our education system. And somehow, that conclusion is made without the Times, the Atlantic Monthly or any part of the media echoing their stories measuring it against actual data from the American education system.

And what, pray tell, does that data say? It says that far from a drought of skilled high-tech workers forcing supposedly helpless victims like Apple to move to China, America is actually producing more of such workers than Apple and other high-tech companies are willing to employ. As I noted in a previous newspaper column (looking at yet another New York Times piece making the same education argument):

No doubt, you’ve heard (the) fairy tale from prominent politicians and business leaders who incessantly insist that our economic troubles do not emanate from neoliberals’ corporate-coddling trade, tax and deregulatory policies, but instead from an education system that is supposedly no longer graduating enough science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) experts. Indeed, this was the message of this week’s New York Times story about corporate leaders saying America isn’t producing “enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms.”

As usual, it sounds vaguely logical. Except, the lore relies on the assumptions that American schools aren’t generating enough STEM supply to meet employer demand…
To know (that) supposition is preposterous is to consider a recent study by Rutgers and Georgetown University that found colleges “in the United States actually graduate many more STEM students than are hired each year.”

These facts were most recently corroborated in mind-boggling detail by the Senate testimony of Rochester Institute of Technology’s Ron Hira. But, of course, they are nowhere to be found in the Times. That’s not altogether shocking (even if it is offensive) — the Times is a newspaper whose ombudsman recently challenged the very idea that the paper’s journalists should actually fact-check statements made by its sources. It is also a newspaper that has helped construct a larger political and media consensus around what I’ve called both “The Great Education Myth” and the “Neoliberal Bait-and-Switch.”

These sleights of hand simply stipulate as unchallenged, unquestioned fact that all of our economic problems can be solved with better STEM education and more STEM graduates. The idea is that this educational improvement would fix the alleged problem of high-tech companies like Apple not being able to find enough STEM workers. This myth endures even though the data indisputably proves that there is no such dearth of STEM worker supply — indeed, we are already producing more STEM graduates than the domestic economy can employ, meaning the only worker shortage that exists in America is a shortage of workers willing to toil at slave wages with no labor or human rights. But, alas, those facts don’t matter because the Great Education Myth isn’t about economic reality — it is an instrument of propaganda designed to distract attention from the tax and trade policies that allow companies like Apple to make so much money off the current system of exploitation.

So that gets us back to the key question of whether the term “education” is effectively being redefined? In all of the elite media’s stories about offshoring and the STEM “education crisis,” does the term “education” no longer mean “learning a set of skills”? Does it in practice now mean American workers learning not new technological crafts, but learning to quietly accept the wage, labor and human rights standards of China — the standards we thankfully improved after our own crushing Industrial Age a century ago? In short, does “education” now mean “teaching American workers to be subservient”?

The answer, almost certainly, is yes, because that’s the only way that the media and political establishment’s entire “education crisis” meme makes any logical sense.

The fact is, while our cash-starved schools would obviously benefit from more resources, and while better schools clearly couldn’t hurt our society, there’s no empirical, data-based reason to believe that improving our schools would reverse the trend of America losing high-tech jobs to slave-labor nations like China. Without a change in tax and tariff-free trade policies that economically incentivize companies like Apple to keep moving production to cheap labor havens overseas, the only “education” that will bring those jobs back is the kind that indoctrinates high-tech American workers to compete with Chinese workers by accepting the horrific labor conditions those Chinese workers experience. Based on the New York Times’ own reporting on Apple, that means an education system in America that teaches our workers to simply accept being paid $17 a day, to work six days a week in 12-hour shifts and to live in crowded dormitories so that they can be stampeded into the factory at any hour of the day. It means, in short, an education system that tells Eric Saragoza to shut up and accept the employer’s draconian demands.

Not surprisingly, the curriculum for this new education system is already being championed by the very political and media realms that originally constructed the Great Education Myth. In Congress, a group of senators is proposing to eliminate overtime protections for vast swaths of the America’s high-tech workforce in the name of competing with China. In state legislatures, lawmakers are looking to weaken child labor statutes, also in the name of competition. And on the New York Times Op-Ed page, Thomas Friedman implies that Americans are lazy and declares that “average is over” and that “everyone needs to find their extra” — elite-speak for the notion that Americans, who already log some of the longest workdays in the world and who are already among the planet’s most productive laborers, must work even harder than they already do.

In beginning to construct this kind of pedagogy, our mandarins are not coincidentally promoting a key part of the educational ideology of their Chinese counterparts. No, not the part of that ideology that is focused on training high-tech workers — the part that prioritizes obedience. Indeed, as my friend Michael Levy recounts in his terrific book “Kosher Chinese,” that educational method teaches Chinese workers never to question their station, demand basic rights or ask for better conditions.

That same ethos is now being proudly promoted here at home. Should we accept it — and the redefinition of “education” that comes with it — we may end up bringing a few jobs back, but we will have reversed the very labor, wage and environmental progress that once defined our basic concept of human rights — and America itself.

*It’s important to note that the Times did eventually publish this follow-up piece to its original article about Apple and offshoring. The follow-up piece looks more closely at how Apple mistreats its workers in China, and that kind of scrutiny is certainly necessary and laudable. However, the fact that the Times made the decision to separate the later piece on labor rights from the earlier article on Apple’s employment decisions implies that the two issues — worker exploitation and offshoring — are separate, when in fact they are inextricably intertwined. That kind of distinction is a real problem. Indeed, pretending that these two issues are wholly different topics (as Apple and other high-tech executives so often do) perpetuates the deceptive notion that exploitation is just a “liberal” feel-goody concern while business practices are more serious, dispassionate, non-ideological decisions. But only when these issues are looked at in aggregate will we be able to start having an honest debate about how globalization really works.

Mencken could recall no such excitement. “The unanimous opinion of all the journalists that I know, excluding a few Liberals who are obviously somewhat balmy,” he added “… is that since the days of the national Thors and Wotans, no politician who was not out for himself, and himself alone, has ever drawn the breath of life in the United States.”

Alas, such attitudes went out of fashion with snap-brim fedoras, smoke-filled rooms and bottles of rye in desk drawers. Today’s national political reporters have attended fancy colleges, regard their professional affiliations as valuable status symbols, hence give every sign of identifying more with Washington courtiers and political professionals than the great unwashed.

To the extent they may share Mencken’s exuberant disdain for hoodwinker and hoodwinked alike, ambitious reporters are well-advised to keep it to themselves. As a career strategy, thoughtful circumspection is advised. The uphill path to a sinecure on “Meet the Press” must be trodden carefully.

Many readers, for example, can probably identify a name-brand journalist such as Judith Miller, who fell into disrepute for parroting Bush administration propaganda about Saddam Hussein’s WMD. But can you name anybody whose skeptical reporting made them famous? No, you cannot.

Columnists have more leeway, but even there it’s safer (and easier) to stick to anodyne topics such as dorky clothes, bad hair, which candidate resembles what character in “Pride and Prejudice,” and who mistreats his dog. To me, it’s significant that an honorable exception like Paul Krugman — my nominee for progressive MVP — is not a product of newsroom culture.

So now comes New York Times “public editor” Arthur Brisbane with maybe the most disingenuous question of the year: Should Times reporters be “truth vigilantes”? When politicians lie, should reporters call them out?

And if so, how?

Brisbane’s two columns on the subject drew widespread astonishment and hilarity from readers and journalists alike — partly because journalists love talking about ourselves as much as the average Hollywood starlet. They also drew a sharp rebuke from Times editor Jill Abramson, who insisted that the “kind of rigorous fact-checking and truth-testing you describe is a fundamental part of our job as journalists.”

Abramson gave instances of the newspaper supplying proper context for politicians’ statements such as Mitt Romney’s preposterous charge that President Obama wants “to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society.” (Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Know what he means?) She said that the Times reported that “the largest entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — were all enacted before Mr. Obama entered grade school.”

Of course, that’s not what Romney’s really saying. Look, as somebody who spent more than a decade waging a quixotic war of words against the New York Times over its role in the Whitewater hoax, the subsequent “War on Gore,” and its shameful (and acknowledged) role in “catapulting the propaganda” that led the U.S. to invade Iraq, I have two observations.

First, the Times has rebounded since those dark days of 2003. Far less unmediated government propaganda and make-believe scandal characterizes its news columns. Abramson’s 2011 appointment as executive editor gives further reason for optimism.

Second, the answer to Brisbane’s real question — exactly how reporters are supposed to go about calling Mitt Romney a liar — has no good answer. Because the more forcefully it’s done, the more the GOP candidate’s apt to like it.

Take Romney’s oft-repeated charge that Obama goes around apologizing for America. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler did this one to a fare-thee-well, showing conclusively that the allegation is completely false — an absurd mix of misrepresented circumstances, doctored quotes, etc. And it took him 1,800 words.

And who read them? Certainly nobody who’d already swallowed the lie on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or any of a hundred right-wing websites. So the Washington Post says it’s a lie. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? The Times agrees? Even better.

Romney’s not talking to reporters, but over and through them, seeking not nuanced news stories, but five-second video clips and TV ads. Reporters who ask confrontational questions can be ignored, or worse, made characters in the story. Well-paid operatives can make their editors’ lives miserable.

The uncomfortable truth is that no newspaper today has the power and moral authority the New York Times so thoughtlessly squandered, and it ain’t coming back. Obama will have to defend himself.