The New York Times, with 70 years of reporting bookended by Walter Duranty on one end and Jayson Blair on the other, with this statement by its publisher, "Pinch" Sulzberger sandwiched in the middle...

One day, the elder Sulzberger asked his son what Pinch calls, "the dumbest question I've ever heard in my life." If an American soldier runs into a North Vietnamese soldier, which would you like to see get shot? Young Arthur answered, "I would want to see the American get shot. It's the other guy's country."

As the Professor writes:

the use of ethics establishments as smokescreens [often conceals] deeper institutional problems. I think that most of the late-twentieth-century ethics apparatus, and certainly much of the journalistic ethics apparatus, falls into that category. But competition is coming, and the Times is already starting to feel a touch of discipline. Which I suspect is what motivated [Times reporter Andy Cohen's] column to begin with. . .

Update: This item, posted today on Power Line about the filibuster battle is actually about a disengenous Washington Post article, not something in the New York Times, but it underscores exactly what the Times is afraid of: its reporting and analysis (or lack thereof) being open to examination and (if necessary) ridicule in the general public. That's why Matt Drudge took such a beating from traditional journalists when he opened the door to one-man journalistic Websites in the mid-1990s, and with the coming of seven million or so Weblogs for the general public to chose from, the Times is all the more worried.