On the flipside, I basically think David Remnick is right:

“Our writers are citizens, and they’re free to do what they want to do,” said New Yorker editor David Remnick, who has 10 political donors at his magazine. “If what they write is fair, and they respond to editing and counter-arguments with an open mind, that to me is the way we work.” The openness didn’t extend, however, to telling the public about the donations. Apparently none of the journalists disclosed the donations to readers, viewers or listeners. Few told their bosses, either.

Me: Few people who regularly read the New Yorker lacks the sophistication to understand that the magazine leans leftward. It’s still a great magazine. Sure, a little more disclosure aand honesty would be good (particularly for the benefit of liberal readers who think that the New Yorker is a divine oracle of some kind) . But who’s really surprised that New Yorker contributors are generally inclined toward the Democrats? Which is the whole point. The idiocy behind the MSNBC story is that it’s reporting what is incandescently obvious as if it’s shocking. And the thrust of the piece and pieces is like it is that elite journalists should do more to conceal the evidence of their biases rather than be honest about them and, as a result, take them into account better. If the producers at 60 Minutes could deal honestly with the fact that they were just plain old liberals, they would have thought to say “Hey, maybe we’re missing something?” Instead, high on arrogance and addle-brained by denial, they plunged ahead and ran that Memo story, destroying Dan Rather’s career and proving for all time what conservatives have been saying about 60 Minutes and Dan Rather for decades.

Update: Or maybe this reader puts it better:

Why the ban on donations? Presumably reporters, especially political reporters, are interested in the outcome of most elections, especially at the federal level. Not jut as a story, but because they think that one candidate or party is going to do a better job running the country they live in than the other candidate or party. No problem with that; if they weren’t interested, they’d be doing something else. Of course, no matter how hard they try, reporters are going to be influenced by their biases. Just like all other human beings. So, since we know that political reporters are interested and probably at least a little biased, what does a ban on contributions accomplish? Only concealing what each reporter’s interest and biases are. Wouldn’t it be a lot better if reporters gave money or time to candidates out in the open than making their contributions to a candidate’s success through supposedly unbiased reporting?