The NY Times likes Republicans and racist conservatives. Their "liberalism" is simply a marketing tool.

From Atrios:

I have no idea why the New York Times keeps elevating racist dumdums to the status of philosopher genius or why the fact that someone deemed worthy of such a portrait "reads books" is notable. He's super smart, and he reads books!
The Times has been doing this for years. At some point Occam's Razor applies in explaining why the Times covers things they way they do. They like Republicans. They like racist conservatives. Their "liberalism" is simply a marketing tool (not that I have ever really thought the Times was liberal over and above rich New Yorker liberalism which isn't really liberal, but their readers think it is).

 The link above is to this article, which is about as chilling an indictment as I have ever read, in which Nathan Robinson reviews Ben Shapiro's work, and wonders why the NY Times acts as if he's a serious intellectual.

Atrios has pointed out several other examples of this in just the last week.  Here's discussion of another example from
How to Interview a Nazi -- White supremacists should be challenged—not indulged:

balance is important. Nazis should not be ignored. They are dangerous. We need to understand where they’re coming from, what motivates them, and what their strategies are. Ignoring bigotry doesn’t make it go away. The basic principles of journalism still apply: They should not be misrepresented, lampooned, or caricatured. But neither should they be indulged. We should not inflate their importance, ignore their brutality, or enable their self-aggrandizement. They are not regular politicians. Violence is central to their method; exclusion is central to their meaning.  Instead, they should be confronted, challenged, and exposed. How we engage them—and why—is an issue of political morality. This is an imperative that sits uneasily with flaccid notions of journalistic objectivity...  You can’t weigh genocide against relatively stable democracy as though any reasonable person might disagree on the outcome... The Times article failed on most of these counts. Indeed, thanks to its obsession with the trivial details of the Hovaters’ daily lives, its effect was not to expose the obscenity of their views, but rather to underscore the normality of their existence. It offered this as a revelation, as though Hannah Arendt had never covered Adolf Eichmann’s trial...  This is essentially the same mistake that the British press makes every time it profiles a jihadi terrorist. The reporters marvel that the killer in question once supported Manchester United, ate fish-and-chips, drank in pubs, and had girlfriends.

I guess this latter case is really more incompetence on the part of the Times, as opposed to their really liking their Nazi subject.