• William McGowan, Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of The New York Times Means for America, New York: Encounter Books, 2010, 276 pages, $25.95.

For committed political junkies, and even ordinary Americans, the fact that The New York Times is a left-wing newspaper comes as no surprise. From the editorial page to news copy to cultural reviews, the Gray Lady operates from a liberal worldview — and a blatant one at that.

William McGowan has done newspaper aficionados a service by giving us a birds-eye view of the Times’ journalistic malpractice, mainly over the last two decades. The many tales of woe come neatly packaged in a 276-page tome titled Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of The New York Times Means for America.

McGowan spends much of the book focusing on the Times’ malfeasance on cultural and wartime issues. The indictment, indeed, is damning, and McGowan offers plenty of evidence to bolster his assertion that, today, the Times is on a steep decline and has strengthened its position as a lead mouthpiece for the ideological left.

The worst of the decline, McGowan writes, began in 1992 when Arthur Sulzberger Jr. took over as publisher. A child of the 1960s Cultural Revolution, Sulzberger tilted the newspaper even further to the left. For one, he overhauled the newspaper’s modus operandi on homosexuals, allowing use of the word “gay” in stories and encouraging staff to come out of the closet. Past editor Abe Rosenthal thought the term “gay” was political, and that homosexuals should stay in the closet.

The obsession with political correctness extended to race, too. The Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal is the most oft-remembered legacy of that policy, as editors admitted to promoting Blair too quickly. Their reason: He was African-American. The result: 36 out of 73 news articles rife with inaccuracies and downright fabrications.

Another embarrassing episode involved Times’ ace reporter Judith Miller’s erroneous articles on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “When no WMDs were found in Iraq, the Times conducted a postmortem, combing through Miller’s reporting; this resulted in mortifying mea culpas in both a special ‘editor’s note’ and an editorial board admitting that the paper had been ‘taken in,’” McGowan writes.

McGowan also provides numerous examples of hoaxes that the Times bought hook, line, and sinker. One news feature followed the plight of a Hurricane Katrina victim from Mississippi who had allegedly suffered from bureaucratic ineptitude at a New York City welfare hotel with her four children.

“But in reality,” McGowan writes, “the woman was a con artist. She had never lived in Biloxi, did not have custody of her children, was on probation for a check-forging charge, and was under investigation by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.”

True to form, the hoaxes typically centered around a political or ideological cause the Times wanted to advance. “The nature of the hoaxes is varied,” McGowan writes, “but most have involved some designated ‘victim’ group — blacks, illegal immigrants, Muslims, the transgendered, military women — as the object of journalistic sensitivity that often becomes solicitude.”

Aside from the many anecdotes from Times news stories, the most interesting part of the book is the beginning, where McGowan explores the newspaper’s recent history and its swift jump over the cliff of political correctness. I found these chapters the most captivating.

That raises my chief criticism: The book is thoroughly researched — McGowan, obviously, has been an avid connoisseur of the Times for decades — but it often lacks enough commentary and context to freshen otherwise stale facts and anecdotes. On occasion, the book reads like a journalism textbook. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and perhaps that’s the effect McGowan sought — scant opinion, ample facts. But at least for this reviewer, more editorializing would have made the narrative more interesting.

As it stands, Gray Lady Down is a powerful examination of the newspaper’s bias and error-making on a case-by-case basis, but there is no meta-narrative. In fact, the book’s tag line, promising an exploration of what the Times’ downfall means for America, isn’t fulfilled until the final chapter. Even then, the impact on journalism as a whole is never thoroughly explored beyond a trifle here and there.

Undoubtedly, the Times is losing its role as the trendsetter for newspapering across the nation. Any more, a random blogger, liberal or conservative, is just as likely to break a major story as the Gray Lady — perhaps even more so. The implication is clear: News has been removed from the hands of the elite journalists in large metros and handed to citizens. Whether that’s a good or bad development is a debatable point; the Times’ waning influence is not.

Four decades ago, the Gray Lady was the go-to-newspaper for Americans. Today, it’s become little more than a left-wing rag. Joseph Epstein, writing in The Weekly Standard last year, smartly summarized the Times current status:

“[T]he Gray Lady is far from the grande dame she once was. For years now she has been going heavy on the rogue, lipstick, and eyeliner, using a pushup bra, and gadding about in stiletto heels. She’s become a bit — perhaps more than a bit — of a slut, whoring after youth through pretending to be with-it. I’ve had it with the old broad; after nearly 50 years together, I’ve determined to cut her loose.”