Why is adoption reform ignored by The New York Times?

Jane and Lorraine, 1983**

This morning's New York Times carries the last column of Arthur S. Brisbane as The Public Editor,* who comments weekly about the paper's coverage, good and bad. In it, I found this nugget:

"I also noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing 'there is no conspiracy' and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds — a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.(Emphasis added.)

Is adoption ever funny to the adopted, to first mothers?

Lorraine

The inglorious New York Times Op-Ed Page today has a story about adoption! You might think that it might at at long last a piece about the continuing battle to open the vaults where the original birth certificates (OBC) of adoptees are still locked up in the vast majority of states--but NO! It's a spoof from someone named James Collins about how the writer is the biological father of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and billionaire behind Facebook, and alas, how said father needs a heart-lung-liver transplant and asks if Mark wouldn't mind sending him a big check to help out.

The piece makes the nod to the adoptive father as the lifelong, long suffering caregiver who provided food and shelter, but points out that he is not the father " in the sense that you [Zuckerberg] are his authentic, natural child." Okay, I admit I smiled at that--at the language, at the choice of non-PC words.