From 30 Rock:

Jenna (Jane Krakowski): “You’ve got to lie to her, coddle her, protect her from the real world.”

Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin): “I get it! Treat her like the New York Times treats its readers.”

If you were the editor of the “National Paper Of Record,” what stories would you have put on the front page this morning?

Our choices would be:

  1. The news that the real estate developer behind the Ground Zero mosque has a very shady past, with numerous arrests and questions about his financing, including a huge past-due tax debt on the mosque site.

  2. The news about the two men (of – you guessed it – Muslim heritage) who were arrested in Amsterdam after their luggage was discovered to have a cache of suspicious objects, leading authorities to wonder if this was some kind of security test.

  3. The news that the Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, sent an email to everyone in his department, encouraging his workers to attend the Al Sharpton rally on Sunday, possibly violating the Hatch act.

  4. The news that an official peer-based inquiry into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found there was “little evidence” for its claims about global warming.

So how did the editors of the New York Times play these stories? Answer after the jump:

Surprise!!!!

None of these appeared on the front page of the New York Times today.

And two of the stories are nowhere to be found in “The Paper of Record” at all: There’s no mention at all of the Arne Duncan email, or the findings by the New York Daily News and the local CBS affiliate about the mosque developer’s shady history.

Admittedly, the paper did write about the men taken off the airplane, on page A-10 – although there is no mention of their names, or background, until the 10th paragraph, after the jump to page A-12, where we learn that “Omar Sufi of Detroit, who said he was a cousin of the passenger who boarded in Alabama, said his relative’s actions did not sound unusual.”

And while the paper did cover the report on the criticism of the climate change panel (burying it at the bottom of page A6, under a story about new sanctions against the North Korean elite), the headline was a bland “Overhaul of UN Climate Panel is Urged,”rather than the more inconvenient truth about what was found.

Is it any wonder our media elites appear so clueless and out of touch?