Third floor editors at the Los Angeles Times are buzzing about a memo from top editor John Carroll dropped in their e-mail boxes last Thursday. It slams a front-page abortion story in that day's paper (now on the Baltimore Sun site) by Houston correspondent Scott Gold. The key grafs are these:

"I'm concerned about the perception---and the occasional reality---that the Times is a liberal, "politically correct" newspaper. Generally speaking, this is an inaccurate view, but occasionally we prove our critics right. We did so today with the front-page story on the bill in Texas that would require abortion doctors to counsel patients that they may be risking breast cancer.

[.....excerpted...]

The reason I'm sending this note to all section editors is that I want everyone to understand how serious I am about purging all political bias from our coverage. We may happen to live in a political atmosphere that is suffused with liberal values (and is unreflective of the nation as a whole), but we are not going to push a liberal agenda in the news pages of the Times."

The full memo is here.