I did it this morning, I do it often: slag the New York Times for doing biased coverage of Israel/Palestine. Do I single the Times out? Absolutely. It is still the hymnal of the Establishment, notwithstanding Arianna Huffington. But let me be constructive: What should the Times be doing?
The Times should forget about the angry letters it gets from Zionists and undertake to educate its readers about the largest truth of the Israel/Palestine situation: Israel faces a grave crisis.
The Times should do so by turning to the realists and leftists who understand this. A new conventional wisdom is developing on the realist-left: that Israel's crisis has little to do with Iran but is of its own making. Many of the writers who describe this process are Jews, including Ian Lustick, Jerry Haber, M.J. Rosenberg, Bernard Avishai, Richard Silverstein, and Jerry Slater, most of them scholars, all struggling to reimagine Israel.
The News here–and let's not forget, the Times is a newspaper with the duty to inform its readers–is expressed best in this piece by Steve Walt, saying that Netanyahu is nuts to be dragging feet on a Palestinian state because if Israel doesn't get a two-state solution, in a hurry, it faces the choice of: apartheid (basically the existing situation); ethnic cleansing of the West Bank (even the U.S. might have a problem); or a binational state (goodbye to Zionism). Last week in a fine speech at AIPAC, Aaron David Miller, a good liberal, essentially made the same point when he said that Israeli leaders "are prisoners of their politics, not masters
of their constituencies." It is "arguable whether they have the moral
authority" to establish borders of the state. Very grim prognosis.
Miller and Walt both look at the internal politics of Israel, which are scary, prey to feverish settlers. In his essay Walt points out that Arabs probably outnumber Jews right now in Israel/Palestine, and says:
the Zionist ideal is losing its hold within Israel itself. There are
reportedly between 700,000 and one million Israeli citizens now living
abroad, and emigration has outpaced immigration since 2007. According
to Ian Lustick and John Mueller,
only 69 percent of Israeli Jews say they want to remain in the country,
and a 2007 poll reported that about one-quarter of Israelis are
considering leaving, including almost half of all young people. As
Lustick and Mueller note, hyping the threat from Iran may be making
this problem worse, especially among the most highly educated (and thus
most mobile) Israelis. Israeli society is also becoming more polarized…
Right now even the Zionists are doing a better job of informing their
constituencies about Israel's crisis than the New York Times is. Howard Kohr gave that amazing speech at
AIPAC on Israel's global delegitimization that I believe has gone unreported in the Times. Commentary does a package
this month called "Israel at Risk" that includes Ambassador Michael Oren's lament that Jews have abandoned Jerusalem and the Zionist ideal.
A few years ago the Times made the regrettable ideological choice to elevate Judy Miller and later Bill Kristol– and worse, to listen to them. Today the Times should make an ideological choice of a far more neutral character: it should begin to listen to progressives and realists.
The challenge to the Times is to show some journalistic leadership, as
it has done on countless times in the past (for instance, in it superb
series on head injuries in football, or in the Pentagon Papers case) and bring these exciting new voices to its core readership, Obama Jews, the largely-secularized, liberal Jews who still have a fantasy about what Israel is, and educate them about the Netanyahu-era realities. It should wake Jews up to the crisis. It should inform them about the creative thinking that is being done about Israel's militarist society by thinkers such as John Mearsheimer and Dorothy Naor (of New Profile, right). 
It should undeceive American Jews about Israel's internal crisis and the crisis of the occupation. It would thus provide intellectual leadership–telling the Establishment how to think about this stuff– and give Obama more political cover to make the necessary changes in foreign policy.
