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An editorial in today's Sun points out, quite fairly, that through yesterday the Times had run some 10,000 words on the Page Six scandal, with at least 13 different reporters credited, as compared to only 4,000 for the recent Israeli election and the same amount for the fall's German election. Why is the Gray Lady so obsessed with this scandal? Perhaps because it's a fun, juicy story? Perhaps because it's fundamentally shaking one of New York's prominent institutions? Perhaps because it's a gripping media-ethics morality tale — and, over the last three years, the Times has become obsessed with media ethics? Well, maybe, grants the Sun. But, argues the little broadsheet that sometimes could, there's also this:

This newspaper war is not only a tabloid war between the Daily News and the New York Post, but a war among at least four dailies for Manhattan, where the Post has a circulation that exceeds that of the Times and where there is a competition under way for readers and advertisers and for standing in the policy and political debates that animate the city. More and more of those readers and advertisers are heading for newspapers that want to lower their taxes, not increase them, as the Times does, and to newspapers that want to win the war against the terrorists, rather than describe the threats themselves as products of President Bush's imagination, as the Times does.

In other words, the terrorists made them do it.

Schadenfreude of the Times [NYSun]
Related: New York's Taste for Gossip Transcends Tabloids [WSJ]