Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, is scared media mogul Rupert Murdoch's the Wall Street Journal will outperform the "old gray lady," forcing a sale to Murdock or "some other unsuitable purchaser.

Murdoch "will spend whatever it takes to undermine the Times's standing as America's leading general-interest paper," Raines wrote in the April 2008 Condé Nast Portfolio. He observed that the Journal has already started targeting the Times's strengths - "foreign news, the Washington/politics report, and the Sunday magazine.

That superlative may be up for the debate. The Wall Street Journal already outranks the New York Times on circulation by almost 1 million, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. USA Today tops them both.

Raines said his fear of a Murdock-led takeover is based on a conversation he had with Murdoch in 2002 during which Murdoch suggested the Times "go after hard business news and beat them [The Wall Street Journal] on their strength."

The New York Times' quest for social justice knows no out-of-bounds, judging by the front-page placement Wednesday of "Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls" by sportswriter Alan Schwarz. Years after failing to secure Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor the right to golf at Augusta National Golf Club, the Times has now turned to the plight of multimillionaire NBA players who get bad foul calls.

"An academic study of the National Basketball Association, whose playoffs continue tonight, suggests that a racial bias found in other parts of American society has existed on the basketball court as well.

"A coming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says that, during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.

It's unanimous! Times Watch guest judges Stephen Spruiell, who runs National Review Online's Media Blog, and Times critic William McGowan, author of the upcoming book Gray Lady Down, both picked as his worst quote of the year one from New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (The quote also earned Quote of the Year honors from Times Watch's parent organization, the Media Research Center.) Spruiell says it was the "sheer arrogance" of Sulzberger's speech that put the paper's publisher over the top.

Howell Raines is the former executive editor of the New York Times who left in disgrace after he oversaw his paper's handling of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. Now that he's no longer in the media, he can preach about journalism, give speeches, and write a book. The book he is promoting is called "The One that Got Away: A Memoir," an allegory about his life using fish metaphors.

At the Aspen Institute, Raines said newspapers should no longer write at the "sixth-grade level," but instead try to write in a more sophisticated style. He also discussed how Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch perpetuates the myth of a "liberal conspiracy in the news business."

The always modest, always charming Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, has a new autobiography out, “The One that Got Away,” a sequel to his 1993 memoir “Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis.”

Dipping into his latest book on his love of fly fishing, we find that Raines is still rising to the conservative-bashing bait.

On page 189, he lets fly with thoughts about liberal bugbear Fox News:

“Fox, by its mere existence, undercuts the argument that the public is starved for ‘fair’ news, and not just because Fox shills for the Republican Party and panders to the latest of America’s periodic religious manias. The key to understanding Fox News is to grasp the anomalous fact that its consumers know its ‘news’ is made up. It matters not when critics point this out to Foxite consumers because they’ve understood it from the outset. That’s why they’re there. Its chief fictioneer, Roger Ailes, had been making up news in plain sight for a half century.”