THE NEW YORK TIMES IS INCREASINGLY OUT OF TOUCH EVEN WITH ITS OWN READERS: The 18 highest ranked comments on the NYT article “Chelsea Manning Describes Bleak Life in a Men’s Prison.” Here’s the top-ranked:

As a physician who has worked with prisoners, what bothers me is how many medical amenities Chelsea is getting compared to the average prisoner. Prisoners show up with horrific late stage disseminated cancers because of staff apathy. If a patient shows up struggling to breathe or talk because there’s a laryngeal mass in their hypopharynx closing off their airway and they had to wait 2 years to be seen, why should Chelsea Manning get speech therapy? The system is struggling to have life threatening conditions treated, it is not justified to spend resources on elective therapy.

Manning is getting speech therapy for voice “feminization.” Well, prison health care is government-controlled, and under government-controlled health care, resources get allocated politically. Manning is a political star, and thus gets speech therapy. If you’re in horrible pain from advanced cancer, but you’re a nobody, well, tough. Everything government distributes is allocated politically, and there’s no political constituency that cares about you.

But that’s not news. What’s news is that the NYT has drifted so far left of its own upper-West Side demographic that it’s getting roasted in its own comment sections with increasing frequency.