Seth Mnookin is one of the hardest working, most ambitious, and most talented reporters of his generation. He’s worked for me at three newspapers – the Harvard Crimson, the Forward, and here at The New York Sun – and each time it’s been a pleasure. Now Mr. Mnookin has written a book, “Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media” (Random House, 330 pages, $25.95). It’s a gripping, fast-moving tale. Mr. Mnookin has all the insider tick-tock on the story, as is appropriate for a veteran of Newsweek, and he’s a smooth writer. He manages to make a year-and-a-half-old newspaper scandal, the basic outlines of which are well known, into compelling reading. That is a significant feat of nonfiction narrative writing.

But Mr. Mnookin misses the bigger story. He begins the book with a quote from Thomas Jefferson in 1787: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” The greatness of the press that Jefferson was talking about lay in that, led by the Boston Gazette of Benjamin Edes and John Gill and Samuel Adams, it had just created a free and democratic republic.

The Gazette was so deeply engaged and bound up in the cause of freedom that the “Mohawks” who threw the British tea into Boston Harbor in the Boston Tea Party in 1773 actually put on their disguises in Edes and Gill’s newspaper office. Charles Dana, who became editor of The New York Sun almost a century later, was so deeply engaged with the cause of freedom for American slaves that he left newspapering to serve in the government under President Lincoln in the Civil War.

So where does the New York Times stand on the cause of freedom? Mr. Mnookin recounts Howell Raines’s 1995 editorial “Mr. McNamara’s War,” which the book says Arthur Sulzberger Jr. nominated for a Pulitzer. But Mr. Mnookin fails to note the editorial’s own failure to acknowledge that America’s defeat in Vietnam resulted in consigning millions of Vietnamese for decades to life without freedom. The editorial said the Americans had died in Vietnam “for no purpose.”

Perhaps the New York Times’s greatest lapse of all time was its Pulitzer-Prize-winning correspondent Walter Duranty’s whitewash of Stalin’s crimes. Not a word of this appears in Mr. Mnookin’s reprise of the history of the Times. The printed falsehoods for which Times reporter Jayson Blair was fired and the Times’s executive editor, Mr. Raines, was eventually toppled amounted to nothing so consequential as Duranty’s error. There were some incorrect details, some inaccuracies in stories about the investigation into the Washington-area sniper.

Mr. Mnookin does attempt to make the case that Mr. Raines’s faults bled over into what he describes as the Times’s “faulty coverage of both the hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq and the supposed ties between Iraq’s former leaders and al-Qaeda terrorists.” These, he writes, were “pieces that had a tremendous real-world impact” on the national debate over going to war in Iraq. But Mr. Mnookin faults the Times for cheerleading both on the pro-war side of things, with Judith Miller and WMD and Al Qaeda issues, and on the anti-war side, by trumping up, inaccurately, Henry Kissinger’s supposed opposition to the war.

The pro-war coverage is described by Mr. Mnookin, citing “half a dozen sources within the Times,” as an effort by Mr. Raines to prove after the Kissinger flap that he wasn’t editing the paper with a liberal bias. This makes no sense. Much of Ms. Miller’s coverage on Saddam appeared before the error about Mr. Kissinger. Never mind that Ms. Miller’s reporting is much stronger and braver than Mr. Mnookin and the rest of the press critics – many of whom have never spoken to an Iraqi or set foot in Iraq – give her credit for. Ms. Miller, at least, is engaged in the struggle against the terrorist threat and for freedom in the way that Edes and Gill – and Jefferson, for that matter – and Dana were, and that her critics, inside and outside the Times, are not.

The high priests of journalism ethics argue that newspapering is supposed to be about truth, not freedom or any other political agenda. Mr. Mnookin never spells this out plainly, but one certainly comes away from the book with that impression. Yet a flinching from the reality of the tyranny in Saddam’s Iraq or the Soviet Union or Communist Vietnam is itself a disservice to the truth, and it tends to mean that the residents of those places are stuck for longer without real newspapers of their own.

My own view is that the most consequential flaw with the Times in re cent decades is that it is out of the fight. There are some courageous, important, and honorable exceptions – A.M. Rosenthal’s columns on Red China and the persecution of Christians; Elisabeth Rosenthal’s reporting from North Korea; Anthony Lewis and Joseph Lelyveld and the Times reporters who came before and after on South Africa under apartheid; John F. Burns’s reporting from Iraq (ignored by Mr. Mnookin). But when it comes to the main struggles for freedom in the world today, for the Jewish State, for democracy in the Middle East and in Asia, the Times – in staff editorials, news coverage, and opinion columns – has been for the most part urging an appeasement line similar to that it hewed with respect to the Soviet communists and their satellites in the latter decades of the Cold War.

If there was a moment that summed up all of this, it was the paper’s star foreign affairs columnist, Thomas Friedman, writing a pre-election column that urged a write-in vote for George H.W. Bush, the president who tried to prevent the breakup of the Soviet Union and who left Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq with helicopters to massacre the Shiites with. The column came too late for Mr. Mnookin’s book. But surely there is some enterprising author out there to rise to the argument that, unless and until the Times maneuvers more of itself onto the side of the struggle for freedom, it – like the Democratic Party – will limp its way on to irrelevance.

Even today, after all, the American public is animated – more than the Times seems to have perceived – by the ideals of the Boston Gazette and other newspapers of the sort that Jefferson correctly deemed indispensable.