For years now, the New York Times has been losing readers, laying off staff, cutting content, watching its stock price plummet and drowning in a sea of red ink. Even before the Jayson Blair scandal, when one of its reporters was discovered to have simply invented a series of “news” stories that the paper had printed, including on the front page, the Times had developed a reputation for dispensing crude left-wing propaganda rather than an honest account of the day’s events. Even it’s own ombudsman, appointed in the wake of the Blair scandal, admitted it had a left-wing agenda.

But that agenda has never been so nakedly and repugnantly displayed as it was in a June 27th op-ed article called “Your Brain Lies to You” by Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, and Sandra Aamodt, a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience.

Let’s start with the outrageous title of the article. According to Merriam Webster, the word “lie” means “to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.” This is not what the article is about. The brain doesn’t intend to deceive you, according to the authors, it does so by accident. Somebody slapped this headline on the article in a pathetic attempt to sell newsprint, a good indicia of the paper’s current state of desperation.

Now you might have thought that Mr. Wang and Ms. Aamodt were going to tell you something scientific and edifying about the brain, but if you thought that you’d be mistaken. Instead, it’s clear that the authors — and the paper’s editors — had a crass political agenda which they sought to hide behind the guise of science. Check out these two statements from the article:

(1)Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.In its concerted effort to “stop the smears,” the Obama campaign may want to keep this in mind. Rather than emphasize that Mr. Obama is not a Muslim, for instance, it may be more effective to stress that he embraced Christianity as a young man.

(2) With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls.

Think you’ll find some examples of how the brain “misremembers” smears about Republicans launched at them by Democrats? Think again. The article devotes 100% of its textual references to alleged smears by Republicans against Democrats, as if the opposite situation was not one worth considering.

The Democratic Party, whose candidates the Times endorses like clockwork, haven’t reelected a president with a majority of the popular vote since World War II, while the Republicans have done it four different times. The leftists explanation is that the country is full of idiots easily duped by Republican smear campaigns, and the Times is repeating that explanation like a mantra rather than telling us the actual news. It’s childish, like a sports coach blaming his team’s loss on stupid referees. And both are shocked, shocked to find that they keep losing!

This is the attitude the paper’s editors transmitted to Jayson Blair, a young reporter who wanted to make his mark. This is why he felt it was OK to make up stories, as long as his motive in doing so was a good one. This is why the paper is losing credibility by the second, and dragging down the entire dead-tree news industry right along with it.

It’s simply breathtaking that an article so outrageous skewed and misleading could make it into the pages of the nation’s so-called “paper of record.”

Thank goodness for the blogosphere!