DROPPING THE MASK: NYT executive editor Dean Baquet sums up ‘the job of the New York Times’ — and accidentally gives away the MSM’s game.

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I feel very strongly—and I know this is not embraced by everybody—that nobody is objective. The system of “objectivity” (and I know that’s going to be a bad word) was designed to create a system—Wesley Lowery is right when he describes that—in which the organization’s job was to make sure that whatever your perspective was it didn’t get in the way of reporting the truth. I believe in that very strongly. That’s not the job of every institution. But the job of the New York Times should, in the end, be to come out with the best version of the truth, with your own political opinion held in check by editors and editing. Not everybody believes that, but I believe that. And I think that if you come to work for the New York Times—if you really want to work for the New York Times—you have to embrace that, because that’s what the New York Times is. Independence means being independent of everybody and of ideology—it just does.

Or not — as the paper’s original ombudsman admitted in 2004: “Is the New York Times a Liberal Newspaper? Of course it is.”