It’s no secret among people who have been following Rupert Murdoch’s bid to purchase Dow Jones which owns The Wall Street Journal that the New York Times has been against the deal and has lost in its effort to stop it.

It’s also no secret among people who are honest with themselves that the New York Times is no lover of the GOP or of Rudy Giuliani.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise to me that, absent the headline on the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, the New York Times would have had its page one headline today be what has been pushed down on the page a bit: “In Fox News, Giuliani Finds a Friendly Stage”.

So WHAT? Is it a crime for someone to appear on a news channel more than someone else?

Roger Ailes and Rudolph W. Giuliani have been pulling for each other for nearly two decades.

Mr. Ailes was the media consultant to Mr. Giuliani’s first mayoral campaign in 1989. Mr. Giuliani, as mayor, officiated at Mr. Ailes’s wedding and intervened on his behalf when Mr. Ailes’s company, Fox News Channel, was blocked from securing a cable station in the city.

This year, they were tablemates at the White House correspondents dinner, which Mr. Giuliani attended as a guest of Fox’s parent company, the News Corporation.

Now these allies and friends find themselves on largely uncharted political turf. Mr. Giuliani, 63, is a leading Republican candidate for president. Mr. Ailes, 67, is head of Fox News, the pre-eminent media outlet for likely voters in a Republican primary.

Whether their friendship would ever affect coverage — Fox insists that it has not and will not — it is nonetheless the sort of relationship that other campaigns have noted, though none wanted to speak publicly for fear of offending the station.

So far this year, one political journal found, Mr. Giuliani has logged more time on Fox interview programs than any other candidate. Most of the time has been spent with Sean Hannity, an acknowledged admirer of the former mayor, according to the data compiled by the journal, known as The Hotline.

Fox executives say Mr. Giuliani’s appearances have been driven by his news value and by his status as a front-runner, not by his relationship with Mr. Ailes.

“I can’t remember his ever saying anything, one way or the other, about our coverage of the Giuliani campaign,” Brit Hume, the anchor who coordinates much of Fox’s political coverage, said of Mr. Ailes. “And I am under no injunctions, restrictions, encouragements or directions of any kind as to how that campaign should be covered.”

Just more fodder for the nuts that want to destroy Fox News. Pinch Sulzberger should hang his head in shame for being the publisher of such a rag. They think Murdoch publishes rags, but I say the Times has nothing to brag about.

So Pinch can’t run the newspaper world (he can barely run his own newspaper to the satisfaction of his shareholders), so he’s going to get angry that someone else bought a big newspaper and he just might have opposing views to his being read by as many people.

I won’t subscribe to the Times but I’ve been a subscriber to the Journal for several years. It’s a good paper and if it goes bad the readers will desert it in droves.

This is all sour grapes and I’m fed up with one newspaper telling me what I should or should not think. At least the Washington Post occasionally has some interesting stories in it even though they too lean way left.