The New York Sun, on the occasion of its fifth anniversary last week, ran a self-congratulatory yet graceful editorial marking the paper’s progress since April 16, 2002. The headline atop the editorial, “What a Story,” is rather grandiose—the writer documents not only the progress of The Sun, but the city’s resurgence from the 9/11 terrorism attacks as well—but what the hell. After all, when the thin broadsheet first appeared on newsstands, with the noble and essential mission of providing, in part, an antidote to the insufferably elitist and isolated New York Times, naysayers had a ball in predicting how long it would take for The Sun to fold.

I can’t recall a single industry “expert” who went on record as saying that The Sun would survive, let alone prosper (if not yet economically, at least in becoming part of the city’s media fabric), and this was before the rat-a-tat-tat of reports detailing the woes of newspaper layoffs, shutdowns of foreign bureaus and the nearly complete collapse of the classified advertising market. So, if The Sun wants to claim that it’s “experiencing the fastest growth in the city” among the dailies, I’d just say, in the parlance of journalists who’ve irritatingly nabbed a little bit of London, “cheers.”

Five years ago, with the exception of The Wall Street Journal (a national paper in scope, although it’s located in the city), there was only the New York Post to counter the Times’ left-wing editorial views, and the tabloid, which has lost a lot of its juice, wasn’t always intellectually up to the task. Consider the Times’ drumbeat of editorials excoriating the Bush administration’s remarkably successful tax cuts, by now thousands of words written by affluent men and women who hire accountants and lawyers to compile their own returns and no doubt look for tax shelters and efficient estate planning.

An April 17 Sun editorial, without naming its mammoth competitor, placed the tax issue in proper perspective. The paper’s conclusion: “Nearly all income tax revenues come for the top half of earners. But the share paid by the bottom half of the income scale has plunged at the federal level to 3.3% in 2004 from 7.05% in 1980, according to the figures charted by the Tax Foundation. This is all something to think about as the Democrats in the Congress and in Albany get ready to make another attempt to raise our taxes and as the Republicans try to summon the will to fight for the tax cuts through which President Bush ignited the boom we are enjoying today.”

You can imagine the derisive comments from the likes of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Bill Keller, Steve Rattner, Lewis Lapham, Katrina vanden Heuvel and Tim Russert—on the chance they read this particular Sun editorial—as they mingled at another genteel cocktail party fortified by no-trans fat canapés that cost almost as much as a John “Two Americas” Edwards haircut. (This is the same Edwards who appeared at an Al Sharpton fundraiser in Midtown on April 18, saying that a country where Don Imus could’ve been on the airwaves for so long proved that “opportunity isn’t equal” between the haves and have-nots. I wonder how many of the latter have ever paid $400 for a trim.)

I usually agree with Sun editorials—although the paper’s ongoing campaign to draft Headmaster Michael Bloomberg as a presidential candidate is a frightening idea—especially on foreign policy and the desperate need for immigration reform. The Sun fights the xenophobia, mostly from Republicans who think deporting 11 million or so illegals is brilliant policy, never mind the damage to the economy, by regularly reminding readers that the strength of the United States is derived in large part from its past embrace of “foreigners” seeking a better life in this country.

But that’s not to say I’m a complete Sun apologist. Seth Lipsky, the courageous journalist who’s the paper’s frontman, is a quirky, irascible, kind, irrational, passionate and often confounding man. Like other writers, I’ve felt the wrath of Lipsky: when the paper started, I contributed countless book and music reviews, opinion pieces and travel articles, and was well-compensated, especially for a start-up operation. That all came to an end more than a year ago when I committed the sin of criticizing R. Emmett Tyrrell, apparently a buddy of Lipsky, in the pages of New York Press. The word went forth to Pia Catton—one of The Sun’s most talented writers and editors—that my contributions were to cease. And so they did, to my disappointment and chagrin: It’s always a bit baffling to find out first-hand that someone you admire has thin skin and a “sacred cow” list of friends who can’t be criticized.

Nevertheless, the Sun’s roster of writers—including Ryan Sager, Jay Nordlinger, Mark Steyn, Alicia Colon, James Bowman and Tim Marchman—is formidable. The Sun’s sports coverage, for example, is shorn of the politics that finds its way into Times editorials and baseball articles. (A decade or two ago, there was a running joke that no article in the Village Voice—whether about dance, a cheap but noteworthy restaurant or a Smashing Pumpkins review—wasn’t complete without a reference to this or that left-wing cause of the day. The Times has gladly accepted that torch from the weekly.)

One of my favorite Times editorials on the subject of baseball appeared on March 22, 2006, as the World Baseball Classic was winding down. This paragraph ought to be enshrined in Cooperstown as an example of stupid writing about the sport: “Baseball has suffered on its home turf lately, with the Barry Bonds steroid accusations exemplifying an atmosphere of cynicism and greed that has tainted the sport from the minors to the major leagues. With the supply of homegrown talent in decline, it’s possible that baseball could someday become one of those activities, like manual labor and voting [emphasis mine], that Americans tackle a lot less enthusiastically than foreigners do.”

Marchman, The Sun’s lead baseball writer, can be maddening in his exuberance over this year’s Yankees squad (especially to this BoSox fan), but he’s always knowledgeable and doesn’t venture into topics like the lack of enthusiasm for manual labor.

And Colon can be too precious for her own good, as in her April 17 column castigating the exonerated Duke lacrosse players for hiring a stripper in the first place. She asks, “Parents, where were you?” In fairness, Colon did question the double standard that drove that Times-led “presumption of guilt” travesty, but in the modern era “parents” can’t be expected to track the movements of their young-adult offspring.

Warts and idiosyncrasies aside, however, the media business is enriched by The Sun’s success, and I hope it grows in both size, revenue and influence in the decades to come.