I can't find much to disagree with is this extraordinary open letter sent yesterday by Lawrence Schwartz, a top aide to Gov. Paterson, to the public editor of The New York Times, complaining about the paper's response to the avalanche of rumors concerning an expose it is supposedly preparing.
As WAMC radio's Alan Chatock noted this morning, it looks like the Times is trying to follow a Democratic Party line from President Obama on down that Paterson must go, and is trying to force him out. The timing is particularly suspect, since the Times was widely rumored to be preparing an expose right after Paterson's pre-emptive revelations about his personal life in March 2008, when he became governor after Eliot Spitzer resigned. What it looks like is that the Times decided then not to pursue the story because it did not want to undermine the new governor, and is deciding now to pursue it because it does want to undermine him.
Furthermore, the Times' non-bylined response to the controversy this week is a disgracefully snarky dismissal of very serious issues, e.g. in this sophomoric line: "It has often been a self-feeding, self-referential frenzy, and it has managed to get Mr. Paterson pretty worked up, too." Paterson has every right to be "worked up" over the grossly unfair media coverage -- from the Saturday Night Live skits to the endlessly overplayed Caroline Kennedy controversy -- to which he has been subjected on a routine basis.
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