An editorial in today's New York Times runs under the headline "A New Day at the City Council." It contrasts the freshman council class, "so full of ideas and promise," with "the city's outdated political power structure."
Well, if it were up to the Times editorialists, those council freshmen "so full of ideas and promise" would still be on the outside looking in, and the city's "outdated political power structure" would still be in place.
Consider the October 21, 1996, New York Times editorial that ran under the headline "Change the Term Limits Law." That editorial noted, "This page has opposed term limits as an infringement on the voters' right to choose." And that editorial urged city voters to back a weakening of the term limits law so that many incumbents would have been thrown out in 2005 instead of 2001: "A 12-year limit would make it easier to maintain a good proportion of veteran legislators," the Times said then. "A 12-year limit is more reasonable than an 8-year one," the Times said then.
If the freshmen are "so full of ideas and promise," and the city's political power structure was so "outdated," why were the Times editorialists back in 1996 so eager to keep that outdated power structure in place -- and to keep the ideas and promise out of City Hall -- for an extra four years?
Hometown Paper: An article in the business section of today's New York Times reports on the retail industry's holiday shopping season. The first quote in the article comes from someone "Bargain hunting along Chicago's Miracle Mile on Sunday." Another quote comes from the manager of a Target store in Charlotte, North Carolina. There is one person quoted near the end of the article who was shopping on New York's Fifth Avenue. This article is an example of the way the New York Times's effort to be a national newspaper is affecting the paper's news coverage. Open up the business sections of most other metropolitan broadsheet newspapers this morning, and you'd probably see an article about how local businesses fared during the holiday shopping rush. Maybe there'd be a paragraph or two of national context somewhere in that story. But New Yorkers who rely on the Times as their main local news source are stuck this morning reading about the foot traffic at the Target in Charlotte, North Carolina.