Politics & Power Quote by Daniel Okrent

A question posed like a trap, answered like a shrug: Okrent’s “Of course it is” is doing more than taking a side in a tired media food fight. It’s an editor’s attempt to puncture the fantasy that a major institution can float above ideology simply by declaring itself “objective.” The line’s power comes from its impatience. By refusing to litigate definitions of “liberal,” he implies the category is obvious in practice: in what the paper treats as legitimate sources, which injustices it instinctively names, which cultural assumptions it considers baseline rather than partisan.

The subtext is also an intervention in a uniquely American rhetorical game where “liberal” gets used as both descriptor and insult. Okrent reclaims the word as a plain fact, not a confession of bias in the tabloid sense. He’s pointing to the Times’s long-standing editorial temperament: cosmopolitan, technocratic, institutionally reformist, skeptical of populist rage, comfortable with expertise. That sensibility can produce real blind spots - deference to elite consensus, a tendency to mistake access for insight - but it’s still a worldview, not a neutral operating system.

Context matters: Okrent served as the Times’s first public editor, a role invented because readers were already convinced the paper had an agenda. His bluntness functions as credibility theater in the best sense: an accountability move. Admit the paper’s gravitational pull, and you can start arguing about evidence, judgment, and power instead of pretending journalism is ideology-free air.