And, David Brooks, who writes occasionally with a nano-patina of reasonableness, is basically, a winger.  Nicholas Kristof goes to causes where others do not tread and Gail Collins can present a funny flair to political events and politicians, but with that material her columns almost write themselves.

I could go on -- going back at least decades before that, in fact, including some huge national issues they dropped the ball on.

The NYT has long been a very flawed and biased paper.  And its alleged non-partisan objectivity is largely a myth, as is the objective journalism of the rest of the MSM.  They all have an agenda -- usually favoring the rich and powerful conservatives, and govt entities like the Pentagon and CIA who've heavily infiltrated them over the years (see Bernstein, Carl in RS, 1977 article).

Katherine Graham and the WaPo -- excepting one brief moment of journalistic professionalism in the early 70s -- are no different.  She's also the publisher who went to the CIA offices in the 1980s, iirc, to inform the spooks that perhaps reporting had gone too far with investigations, and that the American public wasn't entitled to know everything.  

LAT -- agree, it did improve vastly under surfer dude Otis.  Still, it only aspired to be as respected as the NYT, and so had many of the same flaws in its reporting and institutional attitude -- i.e., don't upset the status quo too much, many of them are our best advertisers, etc.  Of course once the family sold out, the paper just went further downhill and is now no longer the hugely important factor in that city it once was.

And I don't believe we've had a Golden Era of journalism in my lifetime or probably ever --  certainly not the mid-20th century MSM.  I also don't believe in objective journalism -- certainly not the sort of bogusly advertised objective journalism the corporate-owned MSM dishes out.  Much prefer the Euro/French type of reporting, where it's clear each media outlet has a definite, overt political leaning, and none of this phony pretending not to have a pov.

But just as in politics -- as well you know -- and so much else, we often are disappointed by the first ones, precisely because they were picked by boys in charge.  And the boys in charge of mainstream American journalism are, as they ever were, conservative.

Compound that with the conservatism of this newspaper at the top, and all is as expected.  That is, anyone who expected otherwise is a simplistic thinker incapable of grasping even the basics, much less the complexity, of the media business.

As for those times that NYT let us down--as so well expressed by Donald and brodie above--I hope that Jill Abramson will help them in a journalistic rebuilding process. While I still grind my teeth over the drums-of-war J. Miller & her entourage there marching to Iraq and still tense up over occasional hit pieces on the character of particular politicians as named (plus the infamous set on how-many-times-do-they-sleep-together series purporting to be about the Clintons a few years back), mayhaps there has been learning from the knuckle-raps that followed. Tho, I don't hold my breath that there won't be further disappointments for two reasons: (1) Power is at the heart of the big newspapers' loyalties or what drives them at bottom, IMO...but, for the essentially strong papers as the NYT has been & can be, the power factor may only dominate in rare circumstances, and (2) Every major institution of which I am aware gets in wrong from time to time and in a big, goofy, noticeable way...inherent in the underlying human fallibility.