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A truly nasty column by Michael Powell in today's Times relies on an anonymous source to smear the insurance executive Maurice Greenberg.
The column says that Mr. Greenberg "has fought a lengthy battle from his Fifth Avenue aerie to avoid acknowledging anything sounding like personal responsibility for the disaster that befell A.I.G. and its shareholders."
This is an odd formulation. First of all, Mr. Greenberg's office is on Park Avenue. Second of all, the "disaster that befell A.I.G. and its shareholders" was really what happened after Mr. Greenberg had been forced out as CEO.
The anonymous smear comes here:
"Is there personal affection for him? Very little," said an executive whom Mr. Greenberg has called upon to defend him.
This is a clear violation of the Times policy on anonymous sources, which states:
Continue ReadingMay 20, 2013 at 8:55 am
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A news article from Tel Aviv about the Israeli politician Yair Lapid includes a reference to "the revelation that he met in April with Sheldon Adelson, the ultraconservative financier who backs Mr. Netanyahu and owns the Israel Hayom newspaper that loyally supports him."
May 17, 2013 at 6:56 am
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"Urging Government Action on Water, Roads and Power in Texas" is the headline on a New York Times article supplied by the Times' non-profit partner, The Texas Tribune.
Like other Texas Tribune articles highlighted here earlier, this one has a left-wing slant. It's not government action that's being urged, it's government spending. And a reader could easily think that the one doing the urging is the Times (or the Tribune) rather than the subjects of the story.
The article quotes four sources supporting more spending — Governor Perry, Bill Hammond, Ed Emmett, and Robert Nichols. Three other sources quoted in the article — Linda Watson, Michael Cline and Stephen Klineberg — don't explicitly call for more spending but talk about the state's growing needs, which the others argue can be addressed by more spending.
The opposition is relegated to a single paragraph in the 23-paragraph-long news article. That paragraph reads:
May 14, 2013 at 8:50 am
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A dispatch from Jerusalem in today's New York Times reports: "Although Israel's economy is regarded as relatively strong and stable, having weathered the global economic downturn, the growth of recent years has directly benefited a small percentage of the population, living costs are high — perhaps because of a lack of competition, experts say — and the gap between the rich and the poor has been increasing."
May 13, 2013 at 10:04 am
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The Times op-ed page is pushing pretty hard for this idea of a tax on processed food. First was Mark Bittman's op-ed calling for "a tax on prepared food, but not on raw ingredients." Then over the weekend, less than a month after Mr. Bittman's article, came another op-ed piece, this one by Kristin Wartman, suggesting:
Stay-at-home parents should qualify for a new government program while they are raising young children — one that provides money for good food, as well as education on cooking, meal planning and shopping — so that one parent in a two-parent household, or a single parent, can afford to be home with the children and provide wholesome, healthy meals. These payments could be financed by taxing harmful foods, like sugary beverages, highly caloric, processed snack foods and nutritionally poor options at fast food and other restaurants.
May 13, 2013 at 9:45 am
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In the middle of an article about the supposed disappearance of the New York accent, the left-leaning columnist in the Times Sunday Metropolitan section (in which there is no right-leaning columnist) hits us with this:
The film, though, is not intended as a sophisticated lesson in linguistics but instead as a tribute to what New York sounded like when the working class stood as a more central cultural presence. Or rather, when they stood as a presence at all, before the vibe of the city came to be dominated by the world of $15 million apartments on the one hand, and housing projects with yearlong waits for repairs on the other.
May 10, 2013 at 11:46 am
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A front-page New York Times headline declares, "After Plant Explosion, Texas Remains Wary of Regulation."
Less wary of regulation, apparently, are the New York Times reporters and editors, who engage in a misleading use of statistics to try to advance their case for additional regulations (though the Times acknowledges somewhere in the middle of the article that "it is impossible to know whether tougher regulations would have prevented the disaster," and toward the end that the fertilizer plant that exploded "fell under the purview of at least seven state or federal regulatory agencies.")
The misleading statistic comes earlier on in the article, right at the jump from page one to an inside page, where the Times tells readers, "Texas has also had the nation's highest number of workplace fatalities — more than 400 annually — for much of the past decade."
May 9, 2013 at 10:52 am
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A Times article about the Sierra Club ceasing its ad spending on Facebook because of the involvement of a Facebook founder in a pro-immigration-reform group that aired a commercial about the Keystone XL pipeline includes the following passage:
Cathy Duvall, director of strategic partnerships at the Sierra Club, said her group was especially disappointed to see the technology industry adopt a strategy that was more typical of old-fashioned, brass-knuckled Washington lobbying.
"When the ads came out they were politics as usual and divisive and pitting one issue against another," Ms. Duvall said. "We were really surprised that Silicon Valley would be moving into the political space by doing the worst of business-as-usual politics."
Talk about brass knuckles — this from a group that just pulled its advertising from a company because of a complaint about the CEO's politics?
May 9, 2013 at 10:21 am
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A Times article under the headline "Israel Moves to End Gender Segregation in Public Spaces" reports on a move by the Israeli government to, among other things, force fervently Orthodox Jewish Israelis to take down street signs urging women to dress modestly and to force radio shows catering to that community to include female broadcasters. The Times article includes two reactions to the decision, none of which comes from the fervently Orthodox community itself. One person quoted by the Times says, "From their point of view, this is a huge attack against their style of life...That's how they will see it."
It's nice to see that point of view represented, but it's a bit of a shame that it has to come second-hand. Instead of interviewing someone to speculate on how fervently Orthodox Jews will react, why not call up an actual fervently Orthodox Jew and ask directly?
Politicians and Newspaper Owners
May 9, 2013 at 10:07 am| Send |
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A Times news article headlined "An Effort To Thwart Sale of Papers To the Kochs" reports that "the two Democratic leaders of the [California] state legislature — Darrell Steinberg, the president pro tem of the Senate, and John A. Perez, the speaker of the Assembly" announced on Wednesday that they would oppose a sale of the Los Angeles Times to the libertarian businessmen Charles and David Koch.
May 9, 2013 at 9:40 am
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A Times news article headlined "emphasis on Deficit Reduction Is Seen By Economists as Impeding Recovery" begins:
The nation's unemployment rate would probably be nearly a point lower, roughly 6.5 percent, and economic growth almost two points higher this year if Washington had not cut spending and raised taxes as it has since 2011, according to private-sector and government economists.
This is absurd. These economists have no way of knowing what would happen. The last time around, they famously predicted a lower unemployment rate than what actually happened after the stimulus. And the Times lumps together the spending cuts and the tax increases as if they have the same effect.
May 8, 2013 at 9:41 am
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A full-page advertisement from Coca-Cola on page A13 of today's New York Times declares "Coca-Cola commits to: ... Market responsibly, including no advertising to children under 12 anywhere in the world."
On the face of it, this seems ridiculous. How is Coca-Cola going to prevent some child from seeing a Coca-Cola sign, or billboard, or vending machine, television commercial, or print newspaper ad?
If you go to the Coke web site there's a little more information. But this is the sort of claim that if it were being made by a politician or a mortgage lender would be the subject of a Times investigative reporting onslaught. When it's made in an advertisement in the Times' own pages by Coca-Cola, it gets a pass.
May 7, 2013 at 1:47 pm
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From a New York Times news article about teacher pay: "average teacher pay — $56,643, according to the Department of Education — is lower than the average pay in many other professions that require college and graduate degrees."
The Times does not point out that those "many other professions" don't also offer summers and school vacation weeks off, defined-benefit pensions, lifetime job security, and generous health insurance benefits. Not to take anything away from teachers — I love teachers. Just to make sure that the compensation comparison is an accurate one.
May 5, 2013 at 9:54 pm
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On Thursday, the Times foreign desk updated us on the development of "class consciousness" in Cuba. On Friday, the Times nation desk portrayed complaints about airplane noise in Silicon Valley as exposing a "class divide." Today, the Times metro desk gets into the action, managing to fit a routine article about an environmental cleanup of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn into — sure enough — what seems to be emerging as the newspaper's standard Marxist analytical framework of class struggle.
Here's the relevant passage:
May 5, 2013 at 9:13 am
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The Web site JimRomenesko.com has a report from Alan Peppard of the Dallas Morning News about a talk at Southern Methodist University by the executive editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson:
While here, she visited the Sixth Floor Museum (in the old Texas School Book Depository) and she watched Cronkite's first bulletin. She commented on how, unlike today, the first report was quite accurate. 'In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired…'
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