In Mark Steyn’s remembrance of Pope John Paul II, republished in his recent anthology of obits, he notes that when John Paul passed away in early April of 2005, the New York Times accidentally uploaded the first draft of its own obituary to its Website, which began like this:

Even as his own voice faded away, his views on the sanctity of all human life echoed unambiguously among Catholics and Christian evangelicals in the United States on issues from abortion to the end of life.

need some quote from supporter

John Paul II’s admirers were as passionate as his detractors, for whom his long illness served as a symbol for what they said was a decrepit, tradition-bound papacy in need of rejuvenation and a bolder connection with modern life.

Fortunately, the guys at Power Line captured a screen grab before the Times updated their article. Steyn would later dub the Times’ flub a “hilarious self-parody of the progressivist cocoon”, adding:

The pontiff’s many “detractors” were all lined up and ready to go, but despite over a billion Catholics in the world and millions of evangelical Protestants throughout America who also admire him, the paper somehow failed to notice until the last minute that they’d overlooked something–”NEED SOME QUOTE FROM SUPPORTER”.

PBS, another representative of the progressivist cocoon, also “Need Some Quote From Supporter”, but somehow, couldn’t seem to find one this week, Tim Graham of Newsbusters writes:

Several national newspapers praised the four-hour PBS Frontline series beginning Tuesday night titled “News War,” on how Team Bush (and Team Nixon before that) undemocratically waged war on the press. There’s not much on whether the press was undemocratically waging war on the elected president in those cases. (Who, pray tell, voted for the New York Times to run the country?) The man setting the table for the first two hours is Arun Rath, who the South Asian Journalists Association website jokingly notes “acquired a semi-classical education at Reed College in Oregon (‘Atheism, Communism and Free Love’).” What a surprise for an NPR/PBS producer.

In a new interview on the SAJA website, Rath explained how he was somehow completely incapable of tracking down conservatives to comment on the show’s arrogant liberal thesis, namely that the press is crucial to save democracy from freedom-crushing Republicans:

We tried without success for nearly a year to get someone from the administration to talk to us, but at the last minute we scored an interview with Dan Bartlett. That, and a number of other key interviews came about from simple persistence and effort over a long time by a number of producers.

We were originally going to feature a lot more about the rise of conservative media in this series, but it just wouldn

Filed under: Oh, That Liberal Media!