The Times' "flabby" Washington bureau

Todd Gitlin covers the Times and it is not pretty.

When George W. Bush bashed John Kerry as a man who was out to "gut the intelligence services" by proposing, in 1995, a $1.5 billion budget cut over five years (so "deeply irresponsible," Bush said, that Kerry couldn't even line up another senator to co-sponsor his bill), the Times on March 9 teased the charge on page 1. It treated the question as a politicians' he-said, she-said -- not even a horse race for the truth but a dog race of yapping pols. But Richard W. Stevenson and Jodi Wilgoren never got around to asking the outstandingly significant question, namely, was Bush's charge true? By contrast, on March 12, the Post's indefatigable Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank actually looked up the bill, itemized its contents, and noted that "the Republican-led Congress that year approved legislation that resulted in $3.8 billion being cut over five years from the budget of the National Reconnaissance Office -- the same program Kerry said he was targeting."

Pincus and Milbank also observed that a similar Republican measure to cut unused funds, which Kerry co-sponsored, passed with the support of the GOP leadership. The Post's headline writer got the point: "Bush Exaggerates Kerry's Position on Intelligence Budget." Eight days later, the Times got this on page A10 -- in the 24th paragraph of a Katherine Seelye piece.

Despite good reporting on campaign finance by the Washington bureau's Glen Justice, the Times keeps missing the Republican establishment's money connections. As Joe Conason pointed out on Salon, a shallow May 16 profile of Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie omitted any serious mention of Gillespie's erstwhile lobbying firm's clients, including Enron and Airbus Industrie -- the latter being an amusing choice, to say the least, for a man who trashes Kerry by calling him "French."

And then there's Elisabeth Bumiller, the incumbent White House correspondent. No wonkish truth-excavating or tedious record-scouring for Bumiller. Granted, she must run into White House stonewalls all the time. But do Times readers really need odes to Bush's punctuality (March 15) and his mountain-biking prowess (May 31)? And somehow, her tone seems to change when she's dealing with Democrats. When Bumiller appeared on television to question the Democratic candidates before the New York primary, one of her contributions to the interrogation of Kerry was the perversely memorable: "Are you a liberal? Are you a liberal?" As time ran out, Bumiller followed up with that burning probe, "Really quick, is God on America's side?"

The New York Times has long been indispensable. When I go to other cities I always desperately try to find a newsstand carrying the paper.

But as it changes its slogan from "All the news fit to print," to "We report what the Republicans tell us," its allure may be fading.