During the war, Times journalist William L. Laurence was "on the payroll of the War Department".<65><66> Another serious charge is the accusation that The Times, through its coverage of the Soviet Union by correspondent Walter Duranty, intentionally downplayed the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s.<67><68>
In May 2003, Times reporter Jayson Blair was forced to resign from the newspaper after he was caught plagiarizing and fabricating elements of his stories. Some critics contended that Blair's race was a major factor in The Times' initial reluctance to fire him.<69> Reporter Judith Miller retired after criticisms that her reporting of the lead-up to the Iraq war was factually inaccurate and overtly favorable to the Bush administration's position, for which The Times was forced to apologize.<70><71> One of Miller's prime sources was Ahmed Chalabi, who after the U.S. occupation became the interim oil minister of Iraq and is now head of the Iraqi services committee.<72> However, reporter Michael R. Gordon, who shared byline credit with Miller on some of the early Iraq stories, continues to report on military affairs for The Times.<73>
The Times has been variously described as having a liberal bias or described as being a liberal newspaper,<74><75> or of having a conservative bias on certain issues by some writers.
According to a 2007 survey by Rasmussen Reports of public perceptions of major media outlets, 40% believe The Times has a liberal slant and 11% believe it has a conservative slant.<76> In December 2004 a University of California, Los Angeles study gave The Times a score of 73.7 on a 100 point scale, with 0 being most conservative and 100 being most liberal.<77> The validity of the study has been questioned by various organizations, including the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters for America.<78> In mid-2004, the newspaper's then public editor (ombudsman), Daniel Okrent, wrote a piece in which he concluded that The Times did have a liberal bias in coverage of certain social issues such as gay marriage. He claimed that this bias reflected the paper's cosmopolitanism, which arose naturally from its roots as a hometown paper of New York City. Okrent did not comment at length on the issue of bias in coverage of "hard news", such as fiscal policy, foreign policy, or civil liberties, but did state that the paper's coverage of the Iraq war was insufficiently critical of the George W. Bush administration.<79>
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a progressive media criticism organization, has accused The New York Times of following the "Reagan administration's PR strategy" in the 1980s by "emphasizing liberal repressive measures in Nicaragua
and downplaying or ignoring more serious human rights abuses elsewhere in Central America" (namely in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, countries with governments backed by the Reagan administration).<80>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times