I remember the New York World Telegram and Sun from my childhood in New York. It was one of a species now long dead: the afternoon newspaper. Those were the days when news dribbled in on the wire all day and all night, and some papers published first, second and final editions. In the a.m. and in the p.m. Like PM, the fellow-traveling, near Communist newspaper that was owned by Marshall Field and for which I.F. Stone wrote. My father bought the World Telegram and Sun for the afternoon stock prices. I vaguely recall it being a center-right publication which was too right for my mother, who read the liberal New York Post with her favorite columnists Dorothy Schiff (the owner who had an affair, unknown to mom, with FDR), Max Lerner, Murray Kempton, James Wechsler, Dr. Rose Franzblau (a serious psychiatrist not at all as funny as Ruth Westheimer) and the gentle gossip columnist Leonard Lyons. The Journal American, the Daily News and the Daily Mirror never crossed our doorstep.
The Sun was revived six and a half years ago by Seth Lipsky, an editor with a journalistic mission (to publish a paper that looked at news in historical context) and a political message that was goo-goo, free market, aggressively anti-tyrannical in foreign policy. It was a pleasure to read. What's more, it had the best culture section of any newspaper in America. No comparison. None, neither yesterday nor today.
The Sun did not like the New York Times, and it made that clear.
Still, after the Sun died earlier this week, the Times gave it a decent farewell. But it couldn't keep itself from a churlish "however." "Some critics found biases toward Israel...a bit too obvious." Well, many critics of the Times find its biases against Israel more than a bit too obvious.