"I know there are some people who actually believe that the [New York] Times has a partisan or ideological ?agenda? ....There are even a few people who think the news coverage and editorial page operate in lockstep as part of a liberal cabal. The Vice President is much too experienced and sophisticated, I suspect, to really believe that. I won?t pretend that reporters? stories are never shaped by liberal bias (more accurately liberal assumptions about the world) but I think those instances are relatively rare, and I fight to filter them out and deplore them when they get into the paper. But that?s not an ?agenda.?"

-- Excerpt from a 2004 e-mail from New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller to Vice President Dick Cheney?s spokesman Kevin Kellems, as reprinted in Stephen Hayes? new biography, Cheney.