It appears that the New York Times has decided that they do not spend enough time paying attention to deranged dishonest right wing stories, and their response is to assign an (unnamed, lest he get stern emails) editor to the giving blow jobs to right wingers beat, to ensure that all of their bullsh&% gets mainstream press coverage:

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

(emphasis mine)
Two points:

• This story was, and always will be, bulls$%#, and so the coverage should be on the politics, because a close examination of the real story, shows no story.
• Having “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio,” is a mark of journalistic success, not journalist failure.
• Anyone who claims to be a journalist, much less an editor, but is afraid to do their job because they will get nasty emails, should not be working in journalism. I said this about Monica Hesse, and I will say this about this unnamed editor.

Seriously though, separating the wheat from the chaff is a part of a journalist’s job, and what is going on here is the aggrandizement of the chaff.

H/t tbogg.