It’s easy to see why the Daily News is throwing everything it’s got into the story of the scandal at Page Six of the New York Post. But what are New Yorkers to make of the New York Times? The Gray Lady fronted the topic for two days running and twice devoted a full broadsheet page of coverage inside the paper to the drama between billionaire Ronald Burkle and reporter Jared Paul Stern. By our count, at least 13 individual reporters have been named as contributing to the Times’s coverage. By yesterday the Times had run more than 10,000 words about Page Six. Over the same period, so far as we can tell, the Times ran just two sentences about the genocide in Darfur, a passing reference in the Times’s own gossip column. The Times ran but 4,000 words on the Israel election in a four-day period during which the vote took place. The German election last fall rated similar coverage, about 4,000 words over four days. While the Times had 13 reporters chasing a two-day-a-week freelancer for the Post it missed the news reported in yesterday’s New York Sun by our Josh Gerstein that a California judge had dismissed Senator Clinton from a lawsuit that had been brought against President Clinton relating to campaign fundraising improprieties. The Times has yet to acknowledge the scandal over the anti-Israel paper coauthored by the academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

So how to explain the Times’s obsession with the Post? Are the machinations of the New York Post’s gossip column twice as important as the Israeli or German election? Is it schadenfreude, or payback for the Post’s coverage of the Times’s own recent troubles? Or does it reflect recognition that the Post, which has been sprouting such high-end retail advertising as Coach and Macy’s, has been gaining on the Times in the only Class A newspaper war in the country. This newspaper war is not only a tabloid war between the Daily News and the New York Post, but a war among at least four dailies for Manhattan, where the Post has a circulation that exceeds that of the Times and where there is a competition under way for readers and advertisers and for standing in the policy and political debates that animate the city. More and more of those readers and advertisers are heading for newspapers that want to lower their taxes, not increase them, as the Times does, and to newspapers that want to win the war against the terrorists, rather than describe the threats themselves as products of President Bush’s imagination, as the Times does. We’re enjoying being in this newspaper war ourselves, even if in a modest way. The fact that the Gray Lady has become obsessed with the Post is a sign that things are changing faster in this town than was predicted not so long ago.