Drunk on Power: New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller

"This is not a time when editors swear off alcohol," said New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller Friday night at a fundraiser for the Columbia University campus newspaper.

"At the moment," said Keller, "the major press is under attack from ideologues on the right and left."

The spearpoint of the attack he sees is blogging.

"A blog is still a view of the world through a pinhole," said Keller, adding that in some cases it is as solipsistic and debased as a "one man circle jerk."

"There is a pressure to feel well informed without ever confronting an opinion that confronts your prejudices," Keller said of bloggers.

So who and what are Bill Keller and the New York Times?

For surprising answers, click here to see discoverthenetwork.org's profile of Bill Keller and follow its links to his colleagues at the Times.

Here's a first taste: you will discover that Bill Keller is the son of the former Chairman of Chevron Oil, that he served The Times in Moscow, and that according to one Times-watcher he despises conservatives.

Keller also despises the Roman Catholic Church, his abandoned childhood faith. He calls the Catholic leadership "intolerant of dissent, unaccountable to its members, secretive in the extreme and willfully clueless about how people live." As one critic noted, this sounds exactly like The New York Times. Is Keller exhibiting what Sigmund Freud called "projection," seeing one's own faults in others?

As to his work as the controlling editor of America's newspaper of record, he joined boss Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. in arguing that The Times should not give back the Pulitzer Prize won by its Soviet reporter during the 1930s -- a Marxist who covered up the killing of millions of Ukrainians by Stalin.

When the Times' own ombudsman criticized Keller's reporters, Keller's response was not to improve Times journalism but to tell his staff to ignore the ombudsman.

Unlike that ombudsman Daniel Okrent, Keller joins his boss in denying that The Times is even liberal. It is, Keller insists, merely "urban."

"Because our origins are urban," said Keller, "urban cultural liberals tend to come across [in Times coverage] as more three-dimensional than conservatives or suburban Republicans."

At least now we understand that his (and through him, his newspaper's) world view is influenced both by alcohol and by seeing issues through the distorting lens of his emptied glasses. Is this worse than seeing the world clearly through a pinhole?

Bill Keller is one of the poster boys for why fewer and fewer people look to The Times and other elitist leftwing media for reliable news and views. Put down that intoxicating ideological booze of power and no-longer-merited self-importance, Bill. Sober up, wake up and smell the coffee that makes blogs so arousing and alive.