This puffery comes from the managing editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson:

We know our readers expect first-class international coverage from The Times and deserve Iraq coverage that includes all of the angles, from the challenges to the United States military, to the complex politics of the country, to the changes in Iraqi society. With other news gatherers retreating, what would happen if The Times left it to others to do the first-hand reporting? We view our work reporting the news around the world, from the China earthquake to the financial meltdown on Wall Street, as a public trust that contributes to an informed society. This will always be journalism’s highest calling.

Headlines in the New York Times today:

Saving a Squirrel by Eating One
On Michelle Obama: U.S. Fashion’s One-Woman Bailout?
Addicted to Peter Lorre (That Voice, Those Eyes)
Didier Aaron, 85, French Antiques Dealer, Is Dead
Connecting Gadgets Is Theme at Annual Show

The stories about eating squirrels the death of French antiques dealers or the dreaminess of Peter Lorre or Michelle Obama’s … interesting fashion sense aren’t objectionable; what’s objectionable is the ridiculously high-handed self-importance with which the Times delivers the news. And does Abramson really believe that the New York Times is still where discerning readers go for insight into the financial troubles or national defense? The New York Times gets its journalistic lunch eaten daily by the Financial Times on the former, and politics has so blinded them on the latter that they are hardly a credible source, especially on Iraq. Take this, for example.

My own take is that the New York Times should do much more of the fluffy stuff — fashion, travel, entertainment reviews, &c. — because that’s what they’re actually good at doing. Television and the web beat them for immediacy, and the Times’s think pieces on the difficult issues are so distorted by political allegiance that they are predictable and lifeless.

Here’s the sort of thing that jumps out, from an editorial today:

Though the state of the state is “perilous,” [Gov. Paterson] said, this is exactly the wrong time to hunker down and accomplish nothing. He pointedly reminded his audience of fellow lawmakers that New York had done great things in hard times. Construction on the Empire State Building, he noted, began as the nation was sliding into the Great Depression.

Paterson is proposing a bunch of government programs to try to support the state economy. The Empire State Building was not built by the government; it was built by private enterprise. It also was, at first, a financial disaster — it lost money until 1950. It was an object of derision during the Depression, called the “Empty State Building.” None of this, apparently, occurs to the editors of the New York Times, who work just down the street. How unchallenged must your statist assumptions be if you fail to appreciate that the Empire State Building is a pretty poor metaphor for government make-work programs? The banality of the editorials is remarkable; you could probably write a computer program to produce the day’s Times editorials a week in advance.

But, please, let’s have another homily about “journalism’s highest calling.”