In 2004 article in The Weekly Standard, James Piereson wrote a perfect description of the rather toxic direction that liberalism took, beginning in the 1960s:

From the time of John Kennedy's assassination in 1963 to Jimmy Carter's election in 1976, the Democratic party was gradually taken over by a bizarre doctrine that might be called Punitive Liberalism. According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement. White Americans had enslaved blacks and committed genocide against Native Americans. They had oppressed women and tyrannized minority groups, such as the Japanese who had been interned in camps during World War II. They had been harsh and unfeeling toward the poor. By our greed, we had despoiled the environment and were consuming a disproportionate share of the world's wealth and resources. We had coddled dictators abroad and violated human rights out of our irrational fear of communism.

Given this bill of indictment, the Punitive Liberals held that Americans had no right at all to feel pride in their country's history or optimism about its future. Those who expressed such pride were written off as ignorant patriots who could not face up to the sins of the past; and those who looked ahead to a brighter future were dismissed as naive "Pollyannas" who did not understand that the brief American century was now over. The Punitive Liberals felt that the purpose of national policy was to punish the nation for its crimes rather than to build a stronger America and a brighter future for all.

Here the Punitive Liberals parted company from earlier liberal reformers such as FDR, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, who viewed reform as a means of bringing the promise of American life within reach of more of our people. The earlier reformers believed deeply that the American experiment in self-government was inherently good, and that the task of policy was to improve it. But in the troubled years following Kennedy's death, the reform tradition took on a furrowed brow and a punitive visage.

I don't mean to imply by the title that ol' Frank fit that description--he was as comfortable with President Reagan as he was with JFK (something millions and millions of Americans would agree with, including my parents). But get a load of this passage in a profile of Tony Bennett by The New York Times' Stephen Holden that Power Line discovered:

Careers that last as long and have been as distinguished as Mr. Bennett’s have something to tell us about collective cultural experience over decades. It has been said that Sinatra’s journey from skinny, starry-eyed “Frankie,” strewing hearts and flowers, to the imperious, volatile Chairman of the Board roughly parallels an American loss of innocence. As Sinatra entered his noir period in the mid-1950’s, his romantic faith gave way to a soul-searching existentialism that yielded the most psychologically complex popular music ever recorded. Following a similar arc, the country grew from a nation of hungry dreamers fleeing the Depression and fighting “the good war” into an arrogant empire drunk on power and angry at the failure of the American dream to bring utopia.

In 2004, when the Times' then-ombudsman Daniel Okrent wrote...

Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?

Of course it is.

...Okrent didn't describe what flavor of liberalism he was referring to. Passages such as Holden's along with the Times' post-9/11 actions put it squarely in the punitive camp.

Update: Michael Barone also has some thoughts on the late '60s rise of Punitive Liberalism, and its impact on journalism:

The second period is the second half of the 1960s and on through the 1970s and 1980s, when the dominant print media (the NYT, Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek) and the three broadcast news networks, as yet unchallenged by cable news, took an increasingly adversarial stance toward American government and institutions and an increasingly partisan stand against Republicans and conservatives. Lemann, who was on the Harvard Crimson in the 1970s, in his writings has seemed reluctant to admit that what I call Old Media have taken such an adversarial and partisan stand; he seems wedded to the idea that Old Media are simply being "objective" and that reasonable people could not be expected to operate differently.

Which brings to mind a conversation with a broadcast network news executive I remember from many years ago.

Q. Don't you think it affects your work product that 90 percent of your people are Democrats?

A. No, no, our people are objective, they have professional standards, they report fairly.

Q. Then doesn't that mean that your work product would be the same if 90 percent of your people were Republicans?

(Quickly) A. No, then it would be biased.

Only liberals, in this view, can see the world accurately.

It's curious to see old media figures hanging on--at least publicly--to the idea that Big Media is objective. The rise of the Long Tail has allowed a few of their more honest representatives ample opportunity to discuss its biases--including, in 2004, the Times' then-ombudsman, himself.