The Center-of-the-Universe Justification for Bias, or "It's good to be the Times"

Check out this response given by Gerald Marzorati, assistant managing editor at The New York Times, to a letter questioning the paper's tendency to target itself toward the affluent:

... Yours is ultimately a question (again, like so many posed by readers) about bias –- in this case, a bias toward the rich and their shopping habits. And my answer is, that while I do not think the paper, in its news section, is biased toward liberals, or biased in favor of (or against!) Israel, I do think, in cultural matters –- of which fashion and, more broadly, style, is one expression -- we are biased (in terms of space devoted to coverage, photography, and so on) toward the rich. And the reason we are is that The Times, though not to my mind a simply liberal paper or a pro- or anti-Israeli paper, is an urbane, cosmopolitan paper edited from the world capital of urbanity and cosmopolitanism, Manhattan, which means we are biased in favor of change, possibility, mobility, individual liberty and going to bed late – oh, and the rich, who are rather concentrated among us. So, philosophically, guilty as charged.

(This is an excerpt. See the letter and full response at http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/media/asktheeditors.html)