Michael Kinsley asks NYT executive editor Jill Abramson whether there's an ideological bias in the paper's news articles.

I know, you can't expect her to admit it. But the way she avoids admitting it is fascinating:

Um, I think that they would recognize a sort of cosmopolitan outlook that reflects that, even as we become international, we’re a New York–based news institution. 

"They" = a genuinely objectively reader. (Kinsley actually posited "someone from Mars," which is a silly image, since such an entity, even assuming he could read English, would lack the cultural reference points needed to understand what our various ideologies are and how they are expressed subtly in text written in a superficially neutral style.)

Abramson's answer is to say, essentially, what seems like a liberal political bias to folks who don't live in New York is really simply our sophistication. She goes on:

I can see how the intensity of coverage on certain issues may to some people seem to reflect a liberal point of view. But I actually don’t think it does....You can verify that in news meetings I sometimes say, “This is skewed too far to the left,” or “The mix of stories seems overweeningly appealing to a reader with a certain set of sensibilities and it shouldn’t.”

Too far.... Overweeningly.... These words seem to let it slip that, of course, the Times is liberal, but not all that much. Kinsley then says that to him it feels like "a sort of Upper-West-Side sensibility, and the politics that go with it," and Abramson tells him that's his perspective.

As long as we're talking about perspectives.

And doesn't it really all depend on where you're looking from?