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In his 15 months as public editor, Hoyt has raised the question of liberal bias several times, only to pass over or dismiss it:

• September 23, 2007: Hoyt acknowledged that the Times’s discounting of ad space for a scurrilous MoveOn.org ad “gave fresh ammunition to a cottage industry that loves to bash The Times as a bastion of the ‘liberal media,’” but offered no argument as to why this “bashing” is unjustified.

• February 24, 2008: After the Times published unsubstantiated rumors that John McCain had an affair with a lobbyist, Hoyt opined that McCain “may benefit, at least in the short run, from a conservative backlash against the ‘liberal’ New York Times,” but again offered no opinion on whether that backlash would be warranted.

• April 13, 2008: “Though readers like [Ellen] Shire [who had written a letter criticizing columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich]—and I hear from many of them—may suspect that the views on the opinion pages infect the news coverage, I see no evidence of that.”

Back in 2004, Hoyt predecessor Daniel Okrent raised the question of whether the Times is a liberal newspaper and answered, “Of course it is.” Maybe Okrent was wrong and Hoyt is right, but the latter has produced a lot less substantiation for his opinion than the Enquirer does for its stories.

James Taranto, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.