In the second segment of Roger Simon’s projected “Burning Down The New York Times” trilogy, Roger drops by a Times’ editorial board meeting sometime between the Depression and the conclusion of World War II:

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Roger titled his segment “Walter Duranty Meets the Holocaust”, But Duranty’s old news, right? As another Roger — Roger Kimball — wrote in 2003 when the Pulitzer Board allowed the the Times to keep Duranty’s ill-gotten award:

There was some hope that Duranty’s mendacity might finally have caught up with him. Recent protests in the Ukraine reached the Pulitzer Board. They convened. They deliberated. They decided. In an official statement, the Pultizer Board said that although Duranty’s work fell short of “today’s standards for foreign reporting,” there was “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception.”

It took me a while to stop laughing, too. Two whoppers in a single statement! One: as if “today’s standards” of Pultizer-Prize winning reporting were something to write home about and, two: as if it were not patently clear that Duranty was a mendacious philo-Soviet hack who deliberately twisted the truth to suit the demands of the Kremlin.

At Hot Air today, Ed Morrissey explains “How to write a NYT article on an Obama controversy”: report it a week after it happened (and I don’t think the entire Times can claim to be on vacation as your humble narrator was for the past week) and carefully omit “two very salient facts about Walpin’s termination.”

Now that’s “today’s standards” for reporting in action!

Update: The Rhetorican spots a milder form of media manipulation employed by the Gray Lady: “Harsh Headlines (with expiration dates).”

Related: And speaking Roger Kimball, in possible of sign of cats, dogs, Gozer the Gozerian, and Zuul all living together, he’s announcing “the Save Frank Rich Society.”