On the op-ed page of today's New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman uses his unique ability to communicate with the dead to tell readers, "Yitzhak Rabin knew that the Jewish settlers, if not rolled back, ultimately posed a risk to the entire Zionist enterprise -- much more than the P.L.O. Because if the extremist settlers got their way, and Israel kept the West Bank and Gaza, Israel would become either an undemocratic apartheid state, with a Jewish minority ruling over an Arab majority, or a non-Jewish state."

It's true that Rabin occasionally voiced frustration with the settlers. But to say he viewed them as a greater threat than the P.L.O is just a perverse exaggeration -- a posthumous smear of Rabin. Mr. Friedman doesn't actually quote Rabin making this claim, probably because Rabin never made it. In fact, by framing the issue as whether Israel "kept the West Bank and Gaza," Mr. Friedman distorts the issue. Only a tiny fringe of Israelis wanted to keep all of the West Bank and Gaza. But only a small fringe -- a fringe that emphatically did not include Rabin -- wanted to give back all of the West Bank. And that is what the PLO is demanding -- plus a capital in Jerusalem.

Look at the record. The Associated Press reported in October 1995, "Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wants to make several large blocs of Jewish settlements in the West Bank -- including three around Jerusalem -- part of Israel permanently, his spokeswoman said Thursday. . . .In an address to the center-left Meimad religious movement Wednesday, Rabin said he wants to annex the West Bank's Jordan Valley and the settlement blocs of Maaleh Adumim, Givat Zeev and Gush Etzion around Jerusalem. Rabin's proposal would keep about 48,000 settlers, or about one-third of the settler population, under Israeli sovereignty."

On January 6, 1994, the Israeli Foreign Ministry announced, "Israel Radio reports this afternoon that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin visited the community of Na'ama in the Jordan Valley and told its residents that the Jordan Valley is of vital strategic importance to the security of Israel. According to Rabin, the residents of Na'ama may have some reason to be concerned due to the arrangements pertaining to Palestinian self-rule, but that the Government does not want the community to be uprooted. He promised that the Government will examine ways to strengthen the settlement economically."

According to a report by Reuters on June 6, 1992, candidate Yitzhak Rabin said, "Jerusalem, the confrontation lines, the Jordan Valley, the Golan Heights, have to remain under our control."

And during the period Rabin was prime minister 1992 to 1995, the Jewish population in the West Bank and Gaza grew to 146,207 from 123,184, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics.

If Rabin, as Mr. Friedman claims, thought the settlers were such a threat to the security of Israel, why was Rabin going around assuring the settlers that they were "of vital strategic importance to the security of Israel"? Is Mr. Friedman calling Rabin a liar? Given the choice of believing Mr. Rabin's own words and actions while he was alive, or believing Mr. Friedman's assessment based on mind-reading of the dead, why should anyone believe Mr. Friedman?

Minority Partners: A front-page, above-the-fold news article in today's New York Times runs under the headline "Law Firms Are Slow in Promoting Minority Lawyers to Partnerships." The article goes on at great length, with a chart and a graph -- yet it never defines what it means by a "minority." Do Jews count? Gays? Disabled people? Whites of Hispanic origin? Do both parents have to be minorities or is just one drop of blood enough? The Times never says, so deep is it embedded in racial group-think.

A headline in the national section of today's New York Times reports, "An Unrepentant Nader Unveils a New Grass-Roots Project."

This is reminiscent of the April 23, 2001, headline in the Times national section, which said, "An Unrepentant Nader Sees a Positive Side of Bush Policy."

If you got your news only from the New York Times, you might think that Mr. Nader had changed his first name from "Ralph" to "Unrepentant." Back in April, Smartertimes.com said, "the Times still is harboring hostility toward Mr. Nader for supposedly costing Al Gore the election. The Times would do better to get over it, already, and stop demanding in headlines that Mr. Nader repent."

But it looks like the Times itself is unrepentant. Today's article devotes an inordinate amount of space to "at least two dozen" anti-Nader protesters. Mr. Nader drew a crowd of 7,500, but the Times prefers to dwell on the protesters and the demand that Mr. Nader repent.

Fuzzy Math: A brief article in the business section of today's New York Times reports on a content-sharing agreement between the Web sites of the New York Times and the Financial Times. The article claims that "the total monthly visitors to the two Web sites, NYTimes.com and FT.com, is almost eight million -- nearly six million for NYTimes.com and two million for FT.com."

Elsewhere in the same business section of the same newspaper, the New York Times publishes a chart listing "total visitors" to news and information Web sites in June 2001. According to that chart, NYTimes.com drew 2.82 million visitors from "at home" and 2.28 million visitors from "at work." That's a total of 5.1 million visitors -- a far cry from "nearly six million." Now, there could be an additional 900,000 visitors going to the Times Web site from places that are neither "at home" nor "at work." And it's possible that there were 900,000 more visitors in July than there were in June. It's also possible that the Jupiter Media Metrix numbers the Times cites in the chart are less accurate than the figures generated by the Times's own count of visitors to its site. Whatever the explanation, the newspaper might consider sharing it with readers, who otherwise might be baffled at seeing the number of monthly visitors to NYTimes.com pegged at "nearly six million" on one page of the Times business section, and at 5.1 million on another page of the same business section.

Satmar Silliness: A report in the metro section of today's New York Times tells of mayoral candidate Peter Vallone's visit to a Satmar summer camp. "Signs are lettered in Hebrew," the Times reports. In fact, given Satmar beliefs and practices, the signs are almost certainly lettered in Yiddish, which uses the Hebrew alphabet, but is a different language.

Newly Published: The international section of today's New York Times carries an interview with Ehud Barak, a former prime minister of Israel. The article refers to "newly published accounts" that offer "a different perspective" on the collapse of the Arab-Israeli negotiations. It's strange the way the Times refers to these "newly published accounts" without mentioning where they were published -- in one particularly egregious case, in the July 26, 2001, New York Times. Had that article bothered to include the perspective of Mr. Barak -- which was available from a public speech he made in Washington -- the Times wouldn't have to be doing a separate article now with his rebuttal.

A dispatch from Moscow in today's New York Times reports on a meeting between President Putin and Kim Jong Il. The Times reports, "For the event, the Kremlin restored an honor guard that had been removed from Lenin's Tomb after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The entire affair was filmed by North Korean crews using ancient 35 millimeter film cameras -- an eerie scene which, to older Russians, recalled the glory days of Soviet rule."

"Glory days"? For Russians, there was nothing glorious at all about being stuck under the boot of a totalitarian Communist dictatorship.

The same article asserts that Russia "opposes" an American missile shield "for fear it would challenge its own arsenal and scuttle an important arms control agreement with the United States." It's unclear how the Times is so confident in its understanding of Russian motivation that it can assert this without any attribution. But beyond that, the sentence is full of flaws. For one thing, it's not entirely clear that Russia does "oppose" an American missile shield. As the Times itself reported on July 23, 2001, "Russian officials have suggested that they may be willing to make some adjustments in the ABM treaty to allow a limited defense." For another thing, the missile shield the Bush administration is proposing is, alas, not robust enough to challenge the Russian arsenal. It would be useful against Iran, Iraq, North Korea and perhaps China, but it still wouldn't fully protect America in the event of a wholesale launch of the Russian missile arsenal.

Lost in Space: The cover story of today's New York Times magazine reports on space weaponry. One new satellite, to be launched in September, "features a new form of imaging called hyperspectral," the Times reports. "Space is already home to multispectral cameras, which can take a picture of an ecosystem and discern conifer from deciduous trees. But hyperspectral goes much further." This implies that there are no hyperspectral imaging systems yet in space. In fact, as Taylor Dinerman, the editor of SpaceEquity.com, emailed Smartertimes this morning to point out, the EO-1 (Earth Observing 1) satellite launched by NASA last year with a Hyperion hyperspectral imager on board is up and running.

How hysterical was Friday's New York Times editorial on "The Mayoral Race and the Poor"? The one that instructed, "The growing number of distressed poor families has to become one of the main points of discussion in this campaign. Voters who do not ask about it now may find themselves demanding answers later, especially if desperate New Yorkers begin to spill out of the shelters and back onto the sidewalks and streets."

So hysterical that even the New York Times editors and reporters themselves apparently ignored the editorial's advice in their 90-minute interview Friday with mayoral candidate Alan Hevesi, as reported and transcribed in today's Times. The words "poor" or "hungry" don't appear once in that coverage, and it appears that, aside from one question about affordable housing, the Times editors ignored the poverty issue in their conversation with Mr. Hevesi, as they have apparently also done with the other mayoral candidates that the Times has been having in for interviews.

Now, some may see a virtue in a separation between the news and editorial departments. And it is true that some of the other issues the Times asked Mr. Hevesi and the other candidates about, like crime and education, have effects also on poverty. Smartertimes.com in fact agrees with the Times editorialists that poverty is an excellent issue for the mayoral candidates to address. But it's at least slightly absurd for a newspaper to be thundering on about how voters should ask the candidates "now" about "the growing number of distressed poor families," when, in 90-minute interviews with each mayoral candidate, the newspaper's own reporters and editors have themselves barely pressed the poverty issue, or, if they have raised it, have declined so far to share the answers with the paper's readers.

Managing Expectations: "Mr. Bush has done surprisingly well in his dealings with a divided and sometimes difficult Congress," a New York Times editorial today says. "He has shown far more skill in handling Congress than many people expected." Well, the only ones surprised were those, like the Times, who had unreasonably low expectations going in.

Note: The letters pages of the Smartertimes Web site were updated yesterday. In Letters about Smartertimes, readers react on antibiotics, nude dancing, Manhattan bike paths and Alabama's Vulcan statue. In Letters About the Times, http://www.smartertimes.com/letters_times.html, how about that Lucent coverage? And what century was Joseph Conrad's?

An article in the national section of today's New York Times reports on a proposal to establish a new commission to consider the closing of domestic military bases. "In the past, the commission has had free reign to alter the secretary's list," the Times reports. The correct word there is "rein," not "reign." The reference is to giving a horse free rein, not giving a monarch a free reign. This is the stuff of middle-school English classes; it's just remarkable that the Times, with its layers of highly paid writers and editors, can't get it right.

Antibiotics Overuse: A short item in the "national briefing" column of today's New York Times reports, "The National Institutes of Health said it had begun a $2 million advertising campaign, starting in Colorado, to persuade people not to overuse antibiotics. Researchers estimate that half of the roughly 110 million antibiotic prescriptions written in the United States every year are unnecessary." If true, this deserves more prominent display than a brief item in the national briefing column. It actually tells more about the health care system in America than all the tens of thousands of words the Times has spilled over the "patients' bill of rights." If the NIH advertising campaign is indeed directed at consumers rather than doctors, it's an interesting approach. If the Times had devoted more space to this story, readers might be able to learn whether any doctors are being disciplined for these 55 million unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions each year. What does it say about the integrity of the prescription-writing system if the government has to appeal to patients, rather than doctors, to prevent this sort of abuse? How many federal and corporate health insurance dollars are going each year to pay for unnecessary antibiotics?

A dispatch from San Francisco in the national section of today's New York Times refers to "the 49ers owner, Eddie Bartolo Jr." This is a mangling of the man's name, which is Edward DeBartolo Jr.

A graphic that runs alongside the same Times article labels a San Francisco neighborhood at "The Filmore." The article, at least, spells that one correctly, as the Fillmore.

Plumping for Pyongyang: A news article in the international section of today's New York Times reports, "Alone among modern nations, North Korea has remained frozen in a Stalinist system that all but demonizes outsiders and enemies and draws its strength from a personality cult -- in this case for Mr. Kim and his father." The North Korean system doesn't "all but" demonize outsiders and enemies; it does demonize them. And it's not clear exactly what "strength" the Times is referring to when it says the system draws its "strength" from a personality cult. The CIA's World Factbook reports of North Korea that "Even with aid, malnutrition rates are among the world's highest and estimates of mortality range in the hundreds of thousands as a direct result of starvation or famine-related diseases." Some "strength." The Times article, which actually does have its redeeming features, goes on to refer to the "warm glow" in Kim Jong Il's eyes.

And if that's not enough plumping for Pyongyang in one day's New York Times, check out the op-ed page. The piece there includes lines like, "When I was recently in Pyongyang, a leading general, Ri Chan Bok, suddenly said to me over lunch. . . " The op-ed criticizes President Bush for saying that the North Korean regime could not be trusted. It says, "The attitude underlying administration policy is that the North Koreans need us more than we need them. But this attitude ignores political realities in Pyongyang." The truth is, North Korea can't be trusted -- no Communist dictatorship can be -- and the idea that America, the world's sole superpower and a free democracy, should have to adjust its policies to "political realities in Pyongyang" is just laughable. Why doesn't Pyongyang adjust itself to the "political realities" of freedom and democracy that are breaking out in the rest of the world?

The national section of today's New York Times carries an article under the headline, "Study Says 20% of Girls Reported Abuse by a Date." The article says, "Of the high school girls, ages 14 o 18, surveyed in the study, about 20 percent reported that they had been hit, slapped, shoved or forced into sexual activity by a dating partner." This is a distortion of the finding. The actual question on the study -- which the lengthy Times article manages not to reproduce -- was as follows: "Have you ever been hurt physically or sexually by a date or someone you were going out with? This would include being hurt by being shoved, slapped, hit, or forced into any sexual activity." The students were given the options of answering "a. No, I have never been hurt by a date or someone I was going out with," "b. Yes, I was hurt physically," "c. Yes, I was hurt sexually," or "d. Yes, I was hurt both physically and sexually."

If you read the question carefully, it's clear that a "Yes, I was hurt physically" answer could include a wide variety of injuries other than the "abuse" the Times refers to in the headline or the hitting, slapping, shoving or forced sex that the question and article refer to. For instance, if a boy stepped on a girl's toe accidentally while dancing the fox trot with her, or if a boy and a girl had knocked foreheads accidentally while clumsily kissing, that could well lead to a "Yes, I was hurt physically" answer -- without qualifying as "abuse."

The Times article also omits the fact that 7% of high-school boys said that they had been hurt physically or sexually by a date.

Smartertimes.com doesn't mean to belittle the problem of dating violence among high school students. Those who are trying to call public attention to that problem, however, only risk increasing public skepticism if they base their efforts on such poorly worded survey questions. The New York Times, for its part, fails in this case to approach the survey in a skeptical manner. Instead it parrots the results in the manner of a press release.

Latin America: An article in the international section of today's New York Times revisits the battle over Soviet influence in Central America in the 1980s. A photo cut-line that runs with the article says, "Elliott Abrams, shown with President Reagan in 1983, and John D. Negroponte are two of the Reagan administration figures chosen by President Bush for senior posts dealing with Latin America." Mr. Abrams is, in the Bush administration, senior director at the National Security Council for democracy and human rights. Mr. Negroponte has been nominated as America's permanent representative to the United Nations. These are senior posts dealing with Asia, Europe and the Middle East as much as they are "senior posts dealing with Latin America." They are, in other words, posts with a global scope, not a focus limited to one particular region; the Times cut-line is misleading. The Times article also quotes unchallenged a critic of Mr. Abrams and Mr. Negroponte who refers to "the unilateral American policy" of the 1980s in Latin America. Supporting the Contras wasn't "unilateral"; by definition, it was at least bilateral -- America and the Contras.

Late Again: An article in the international section of today's New York Times today waddles in with the news that Senator Clinton and Senator Schumer are urging the White House to take a tough line against the inclusion of "Zionism is racism" at a U.N. conference. The New York Post reported this on Saturday; Smartertimes.com noted it on Sunday; the New York Times, while criticizing President Bush for his stance on the U.N. conference, has taken until today to note the positions of Senators Schumer and Clinton.

Missing Editorial: When the New York Post's parent company did a deal to get two television stations in New York, the New York Times (July 28, 2001) wrote an editorial calling for Congressional hearings on "the preservation of diversity in the media business and the dangers of excessive consolidation." Somehow, today's paper seems to be missing such an editorial on the takeover of a Long Island public television station by a New York City public television station. No hand-wringing, no call for congressional hearings on this one. No disclosure, either, in today's metro-section news article on the public television "merger," of the fact that the chairman of the New York City station is a personal friend of the publisher of the New York Times, or of the fact that the New York Times has itself been investigating launching a news program on public television.

If two former presidents of the United States came out in favor of a blatantly unconstitutional plan to restrict the press, would it be big news? Not, apparently, in the judgment of the New York Times, which reports in its national section today on the recommendations of a commission on election reform that was headed by Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. "A summary of the report made available tonight to news organizations recommends legislation, if necessary, to bar them from projecting winners in the presidential contest until the polls have closed in the 48 contiguous states."

It's hard to imagine how such a "bar" on news organizations could be imposed through "legislation" without contravening the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

Moreover, while the Carter-Ford proposal seems to be an attempt to solve an equal protection problem -- under the current system, some late-voting people on the West Coast might not go to the polls until after the press projects a winner -- it in fact would have the effect of worsening that problem. Under the current system, the election projections are not an act of government. By enshrining into law this "contiguous states" rule, however, Congress would be essentially imposing a system under which residents of Alaska and Hawaii have different protections than everyone else.

The Times doesn't bother to get any critical comment, or any comment at all, in today's article from representatives of the press or from representatives of Alaska or Hawaii. That, no doubt, is exactly what Mr. Carter and Mr. Ford were hoping for when they decided to release a summary of the report the night before. But just because Mr. Carter and Mr. Ford are wise at the spin game doesn't mean that the Times has to fall for it.

Not a Loner: A front-page article in today's New York Times on President George W. Bush's foreign policy reports, "It should be noted, however, that President Bush is criticized for rejecting two agreements that even Mr. Clinton did not wholeheartedly advocate: the international ban on land mines and an accord establishing a permanent International Criminal Court."

In fact, there are at least three such agreements. Mr. Clinton was never a wholehearted advocate of the Kyoto Accord, either. He signed it but immediately announced that he would seek to have it modified, and he declared he had no intent to submit it for ratification.

Unreformed on Welfare: As part of its continuing series of attacks on welfare reform, the New York Times today reports in its national section on a study purporting to show that the adolescent children of families in welfare-to-work programs "have lower academic achievement and more behavioral problems than the children of other welfare households." The Times article quotes an author of the study declaring "there were no positive findings," and, just in case you missed the point, quotes the same author again declaring, "there were no positive impacts." For good measure, the Times prints a chart showing that adolescent children of those in welfare-to-work families, compared with traditional welfare families, had higher incidences of being arrested for a crimes, suspended from high school, experiencing below-average academic achievement or being in special education classes.

One interesting aspect here is that being in "special education" is listed in the Times graphic as part of the evidence that welfare-to-work children "fared poorly." This is more a commentary on the Times' view of special education that it is on welfare reform; for students with genuine learning disabilities, special education, where classes tend to be smaller and teachers have additional training, may be the best place. A child who genuinely belongs in special education may have "fared poorly" if instead of getting the help he needs he is ignored and left to fail in mainstream classes.

Beyond that, however, what of the claim -- repeated twice in the Times article and left entirely unchallenged -- that there are "no positive impacts" of the welfare-to-work programs on the adolescent children of those enrolled? Buried in the middle of the Times article is the news that "Adolescents whose parents were in the Canadian program were performing household chores, among them caring for their siblings, slightly more frequently than those whose parents were not in the program. They were also more likely to be working 20 hours a week or more, a level of employment that previous studies have found to decrease school achievement and increase problem behavior like drinking. In Florida, too, parental participation in the program increased the likelihood that the adolescent children were caring for younger brothers and sisters."

Isn't it just possible that, rather than being early indicators of alcoholism, helping with household chores, taking care of siblings, and working outside the home are "positive impacts"? And isn't it possible that, between the work outside the home of the parents and the adolescents, the welfare-to-work families have more money now than they did when they were on welfare? Might some interpret that as a "positive impact"? The Times' unwillingness to consider these issues -- or even to quote a single person in the story about the study other than the study's author -- reveals much about the newspaper's attitude toward work.

A dispatch from Jerusalem in today's New York Times refers to "the elevated plateau, referred to by Jews and many Christians as the Temple Mount and known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary."

Fair enough. But what, then, are readers to make of the photo cut-line above the fold on the front page of today's Times, which reports, "Israeli policemen stormed the Noble Sanctuary, known to Jews as the Temple Mount"? On the front page, it looks like the Times is ignoring the Christians, slighting the Jews, and using the Muslim terminology without identifying it as such.

Containment Versus Rollback: A dispatch from Canberra in the international section of today's New York Times reports on a false dichotomy between "the two broadly defined China camps in the administration -- the 'engagers' and the 'containers.'"

"At the State Department, the under secretary of state for arms control, John R. Bolton, who has strong ties to Taiwan, is viewed as believing in the necessity of containing China," the Times reports. Note the passive voice: "is viewed." Had Mr. Bolton himself described his views openly and honestly, he may well have said he doesn't think China should merely be "contained," but that America should help its people as they struggle to free themselves from the oppressive one-party rule of the Communist regime there. Smartertimes.com hasn't spoken with Mr. Bolton on this issue but has a pretty good sense of where he is coming from. The Times often mistakes the democratization or rollback camp for the containment camp when it comes to China.

An item in the Political Briefing column in the national section of today's New York Times runs under the headline, "Sufficiently Scorned, But Paid in Full." The item reports, "After Senator James M. Jeffords of Vermont bolted the Republican Party and became an independent, giving control of the Senate to Democrats, he said contributors to his last election campaign who felt sufficiently scorned could get their money back by sending in a request. Of the 3,230 people who originally gave, 52 asked for refunds. And last week, as promised, Mr. Jeffords made them whole, to the tune of $17,500."

That item and headline significantly mischaracterize both Mr. Jeffords' offer and his action. As an Associated Press dispatch from Montpelier this week made clear, the senator offered a refund only to Vermonters, not to political action committees or to out-of-state contributors. Mr. Jeffords hasn't paid "in full"; he's paid in part. The AP considered that distinction worth preserving in its brief report last week on the refunds; it's hard to see why the Times would blur it.

Erotic Dance: The Arts and Leisure section of today's New York Times publishes a defense of strip clubs. The article really has to be read to be believed. It is written by a "senior research scholar in the dance department at the University of Maryland, College Park," and it warns that "the threat of further assaults on nude dancing looms large." Never mind that some might see that as a hope, not a "threat"; for all intents and purposes, this is an opinion piece, not a news article, and Smartertimes.com will treat it as such.

The article claims that "A police study in Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta, showed no adverse effects of nude dancing." It's breathtaking that the Times can print this without even a passing reference to its report from Atlanta last week. That report said, "The marathon strip-club trial that promised to embarrass some of the country's best-known athletes and entertainers finally lived up to its billing today when Patrick Ewing, the veteran National Basketball Association star, took the stand and admitted that he received sexual favors on two occasions from dancers at the Gold Club. Mr. Ewing, the former center for the New York Knicks who joined the Orlando Magic last week, said he never paid the dancers for the oral sex he received, or the club for the drinks and the private V.I.P. room where the incidents took place. . . Mr. Ewing's testimony as a prosecution witness was designed to bolster the federal government's case that Steven E. Kaplan, the club's owner, paid his employees to have sex with prominent athletes to raise its profile and lure paying customers. . . .In 1999, the government charged 15 people connected with the Gold Club with a variety of racketeering, money laundering and prostitution charges. The indictment said the Gold Club -- the most prominent of Atlanta's 22 'gentlemen's clubs' popular with tourists -- supplied cash to the Gambino organized- crime family of New York in exchange for protection." The Gold Club's owners have denied wrongdoing. But even in an opinion piece, for the Times to cite Atlanta as a place where there are "no adverse effects of nude dancing" in the face of the Times's own reports about federal indictments for prostitution and mob ties is just amazing.

Today's Arts and Leisure article says, "The legend is that the clubs are gangster-run strip joints, though since the 1980's close to 3,000 well-run, often luxuriously appointed gentlemen's clubs patronized by male and female professionals and businessmen have appeared around the country." The gangster connection isn't merely "legendary," as the Times claims; it's a fact. In addition to Times's own reporting on the alleged Gambino ties of the Gold Club, the Arts and Leisure editors might want to check out a front-page story from the August 30, 1998, Sunday New York Times, which ran under the headline, "Strip Club Partners, Now Ruined, Blame Greed and the Mob." That article reported, "As the 90's began, Michael D. Blutrich and Lyle K. Pfeffer, two men from sedate, middle-class backgrounds, were riding high. Mr. Blutrich, a founding partner in a politically connected Park Avenue law firm, and Mr. Pfeffer, a self-styled venture capitalist, were each taking in more than $500,000 a year. But they wanted more. Greed, they now admit, inspired them to become prominent players in two major conspiracies: siphoning millions from a Florida-based insurance company and allowing the Gambino organized-crime family to become their secret partners in Scores, a topless club on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. "

Today's Arts and Leisure article goes on to claim that "there is no scientifically valid evidence for adverse secondary effects of erotic dance clubs."

The New York Times itself is on record with an opposite view. An October 26, 1996, Times editorial, for instance, praised a Giuliani administration initiative "to foreclose X-rated businesses from clustering in a 'red-light' district of the sort that has historically blighted Times Square, where this newspaper is published." The editorial praised a judge's opinion that "found in the city's various planning studies sufficient evidence of the negative impact on crime, property values and community character to support the city's use of its zoning authority to address a serious neighborhood problem. The city's legitimate purpose was not to regulate speech, she observed, but the negative effects of sex-related shops on their surroundings."

Another Times editorial, on August 10, 1998, referred to the "worthy purpose of protecting communities from the adverse impact of sex-related businesses."

Today's Arts and Leisure article concludes by likening those who would restrict strip clubs to Adolf Hitler.

Readers wondering why this University of Maryland scholar is defending strip clubs with such outlandish claims may chalk her views up to academic isolation. Or they might notice the sentence in the article that states that the scholar was "discovered" by a planner and by a lawyer representing nude dancers in Seattle, who "asked" her to be "an expert court witness." "Asked" is a strange way of putting it; the University of Maryland scholar was "asked" to be an expert witness in about the same way that a woman at a strip club is "asked" to provide a lap dance. A news article in the May 7, 1996, News Tribune of Tacoma, Washington was more direct: it identified her as a "University of Maryland anthropologist hired by club owners."

When the Bush administration tries to name to a government post a respected regulatory scholar like John Graham who has received funding from the industries he studies, the Times goes into an uproar about the supposed corrupting influence of corporate funding on the integrity of research. Yet here the newspaper is printing the lame arguments of a scholar in favor of strip clubs without even disclosing to the paper's readers that she was "hired" by the strip clubs.

Knowing that the scholar was "hired" makes it somewhat easier to understand why she is making such outlandish arguments. It's less easy to understand why the Times is publishing them.

Mired in the Past: As the climactic conclusion to a litany of supposed sins of the Bush administration -- missile defense, arsenic, opposing Kyoto -- the "Liberties" columnist on the op-ed page of today's New York Times writes, "There was even talk last week that the White House might pull out of a U.N. conference on racism."

"Even"! Boy, if the Bush administration is refusing to attend a U.N. conference on racism, it sure must be retrograde and maybe even racist, huh? The Times columnist cites the threat as evidence that Mr. Bush is "mired in the past" and full of "hollow hubris."

You would have had to read Saturday's New York Post to find out that Mr. Bush's stance on the conference has the backing of both of New York's senators, Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and that the conference is being planned as a forum to condemn Israel. The Post reported that the proposed language for the conference states, "We recognize . . .with deep concern the increase of racist practices of Zionism. . .as well as the emergence of racial and violent movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas, in particular the Zionist movement which is based on racial superiority." Senator Schumer, a Democrat, told the Post that Mr. Bush is "absolutely right" in his stance on the U.N. conference. Maybe Mr. Schumer can explain this to the Times columnist.

Can't Spell: The lead article in the Sunday Styles section of today's New York Times refers to a fashion designer as "Shoshanna Lowenstein." In fact, the correct spelling of her last name is Lonstein.

An article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports on a deal between Mayor Giuliani and unions for some of the city's uniformed employees, including firefighters, sanitation workers and corrections officers. "In announcing the deal, the mayor said that the city would institute $500 million in spending reductions and revenue enhancements to cover the cost of the agreements and to make up for an anticipated shortfall in state aid," the Times reports.

"Revenue enhancements"? Talk about a euphemism. How much of that $500 million is going to be spending reductions and how much is going to be "revenue enhancements," a Times reader already frustrated at living in a city with one of the highest tax burdens in the U.S. might reasonably wonder? And how exactly are these revenues going to be "enhanced"? By increased taxes? By increased service fees? By better collection? By soaking the rich?

Media Rules: An editorial in today's New York Times calls for Congressional hearings on "the preservation of diversity in the media business and the dangers of excessive consolidation." The Times seems to want these hearings to focus on Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp., which, the Times warns, now owns two New York television stations, which will have "a combined 11 percent share of viewers in the market." Well, given that the Times is so eager for congressional intervention in this issue, how about hearings on what percent share of New York department-store advertising the Times has? How about hearings on what percent of the Eastern and Central Massachusetts newspaper market the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette -- all owned by the Times company -- have? Somehow those subjects are left out of the Times editorial. Maybe the Times would have a different view of Congressional intervention in these matters if Congress were probing the Times's corporate interests and not those of News Corp., which owns the New York Post. It's not like the Times Company has exactly a heroic record on the question of diversity and consolidation in the media business.

Carmi Gillon: A front-page article in today's New York Times reports on a controversy over Israel's ambassador to Denmark, Carmi Gillon. The Times reports that Mr. Gillon "was the Shin Bet chief in the mid-1990's" and that "there was some talk in Copenhagen about arresting Mr. Gillon the moment he stepped off the plane." The Danish reaction is ridiculous; Mr. Gillon is an ardent dove who was director-general of the Peres Center for Peace and, as the Times itself reported on August 16, 1998, was on the advisory council of the Israel Policy Forum, a dovish group allied with the dovish wing of Israel's Labor Party. On May 12, 1998, Mr. Gillon published an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times criticizing Prime Minister Netanyahu for not yielding to American and Arab pressure to withdraw from an additional 13% of the West Bank. For the Times to identify Mr. Gillon solely as a former head of the Shin Bet without mentioning his more recent activities as an advocate of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinian Arabs gives readers a mistaken impression.

Camp David: A New York Times editorial this morning claims: "Camp David fell short because of insufficient preparation and a lack of trust and chemistry between the two leaders." That is a pretty shallow analysis. The reason the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs didn't trust each other was that the Palestinian Arabs hadn't renounced terrorism or reconciled themselves to Israel's existence. That goes somewhat beyond "a lack of trust and chemistry."

On June 4, 2001, the New York Times printed a front-page, above-the-fold news article from Washington reporting that the United States had moved to reduce relations with the Chinese military. The effect was to make the Bush administration, and in particular its defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, look like they were acting unilaterally to chill relations between America and Communist China. "Under the new policy, the United States is also no longer requesting port calls in Hong Kong, requests that the Pentagon had previously made to reinforce the territory's unique status," the Times reported in that front-page, June 4 article, which Smartertimes.com pegged at the time as bogus, but which the Times never corrected. (See http://www.smartertimes.com/archive/2001/06/010604.html).

So it's pretty interesting to see an item buried as a brief in the World Briefing column of today's New York Times, as follows: "CHINA: U.S. SHIPS ENTER HONG KONG Two United States warships sailed into Hong Kong's harbor in a resumption of port calls that had been halted by the Chinese government after the mid-air collision between Chinese and American military planes last April. The Guardian and the Patriot, both minesweepers, will anchor in Hong Kong until Monday. In May, when relations between the countries were tense, China denied a request by the Inchon to call at the former British colony."

Oh, so it turns the port calls at Hong Kong had been halted, not by a "new policy" of the United States but by "the Chinese government." This has to be one of the sorriest attempts at a correction ever executed by the New York Times. Not only is it buried as a brief when the original accusation against the Bush administration was a front-page story, but today's brief contains no reference to that erroneous front-page story. It's as if the Times assumes its readers are too dumb to notice that on June 4 the newspaper reported a new U.S. policy against port calls in Hong Kong, and less than two months later the newspaper is reporting U.S. port calls in China are resuming after being "halted by the Chinese government."

Take Your Pick: A Reuters dispatch in the business section of today's New York Times reports on the Philip Morris-sponsored study of the financial benefits to the Czech Republic from the premature death of smokers. "Though the report has been met with outrage in the United States, reaction in the Czech Republic was nonchalant," the Reuters dispatch reprinted by the Times reports.

Nonchalant, huh? A New York Times dispatch from Prague on Saturday, July 21, reported that "The Czech government and press . . . reacted in outrage" to the report. "This is first-class cynicism and hyena-ism," wrote the country's leading daily newspaper, Mlada Fronta Dnes, according to the Saturday Times, which said the paper compared Philip Morris "to the Nazi SS." The Saturday Times also quoted a Czech government spokesman calling the report "unbelievable" and "ethically unacceptable."

Well, maybe the Czechs reacted with nonchalant outrage, or with outraged nonchalance, but otherwise, it's hard to see how the Times editors can justify delivering to readers both of these reports without any explanation of the apparent contradiction.

Public Interest: A front-page article in today's New York Times refers to "Citizens for Missouri's Children, a public interest group." A quick check of the group's Web site shows it is stocked with press releases trumpeting news like: "Report says Bush's $555 billion tax cuts for richest 1% require leaving poor children behind. . . President Bush's claim that more that $1.6 trillion dollars is 'left over' as a surplus available for tax cuts requires ignoring the needs of poor children." Other material on the site shows the group is lobbying to spend a large portion of Missouri's share of the tobacco settlement on child welfare programs. Some people think lobbying against the Bush tax cuts and for welfare spending is in the "public interest"; others don't. By labeling this a "public interest group," the Times is taking sides. It would be more accurate and neutral to call Citizens for Missouri's Children an advocacy group. Smartertimes.com has made this point about the Times labeling liberal groups as "public interest" groups before, and the Times news desk, in apparent agreement, even circulated one of those criticisms to the paper's staff as part of its regular weekly internal critique. What's the point of sending around those internal memos if the newspaper's staff is just going to ignore them?

They Sure Does: This, from an article in the weekend section of today's New York Times about riding a bicycle with Senator Schumer: "Bike lanes now makes it possible for people to ride from the tip of Manhattan to the George Washington Bridge, a dazzling ride that Mr. Schumer has already taken a half-dozen times." There are at least three problems with that sentence. First, the reference to "the tip of Manhattan" is too vague; Manhattan has a northern tip and a southern tip. Second, there's a qualifier missing. A person could ride from either tip of Manhattan to the George Washington Bridge before bike lanes were installed. It would be dangerous; a cyclist would have to stop for red lights and for traffic and wouldn't have sweeping Hudson River views, but it would be "possible." Finally, the plural "bike lanes" should take a plural verb; "make," not "makes."

First Black: Yesterday's Smartertimes.com criticized the Times business section for the clumsy way it reported on the race of an executive who was promoted at Merrill Lynch. In yesterday's article on the Merrill Lynch executive, the "first black" reference was in the first paragraph of the story. It's interesting to notice how much more judiciously the Times handles the same issue today in reporting on one of the newspaper's own executives who is in a similar position. The Times reports that "he will become the first black to hold one of the newspaper's top two editing jobs." But the Times mentions this only in the eighth paragraph of the story, after detailing the editor's news experience.

Note: Smartertimes.com is in Massachusetts this morning and is operating off the New England edition of the New York Times.

Today's New York Times features a front-page "special report" on how Israel and Ariel Sharon, as much as Yasser Arafat, are to blame for the failure of the "Quest for Mideast Peace." The article is so flawed it's hard to know where to start, but let's start with the subheadline: "Many Now Agree That All The Parties, Not Just Arafat, Were to Blame."

That's not even what the article says. The article, to the contrary, says that in Israel and the United States, a "narrative has taken hold" that says Mr. Arafat was to blame, "but many diplomats and officials believe that the dynamic was far more complex and that Mr. Arafat does not bear sole responsibility for the breakdown of the peace effort." Of course, a headline that said, "Same 20 Diplomats Who Have Been Pursuing Failed Mideast Peace Process For a Decade Are Still Making Excuses for Arafat, Blaming Israel and Clinging to Flawed Assumptions" doesn't exactly have the same New York Times front-page ring to it.

The first such official or diplomat quoted in the article is the U.N. special envoy. This is an envoy of the same U.N. that declared Zionism is racism and that to this day is refusing to release to Israel videotape that could help lead to the capture of Hezbollah terrorists.

The article's own flawed assumptions are bared later on in the story, in this paragraph: "Yet relatively few Israelis, Palestinian or outside observers believe that there can be a military solution to their conflict -- or that a solution can be imposed. Thus the two sides will eventually have to return somehow to some kind of talks."

Flawed assumption No. 1: There are "two sides." Without support from Iran, Iraq, Syria (and Syria's puppet state, Lebanon) and Egypt, the Palestinian Arabs would be in a much weaker position. If America or Israel succeeds in assisting free, democratic opposition forces in those countries in overthrowing the existing regimes, Israel's strategic position would change dramatically. It's as if the Times were writing about U.S.-Soviet negotiations in 1987 without taking into account the possibility that Poland, East Germany and the rest of the Warsaw Pact countries might ever break free.

Flawed assumption No. 2: "The two sides" are constant. This is like writing about U.S.-Soviet negotiations in 1987 while assuming that the Communist Party will always rule Russia. Perhaps some non-Arafat Palestinians will emerge as Israel's negotiating partner. Perhaps Mr. Arafat will die. Perhaps the Palestinian Arabs will realize that Mr. Arafat and his terrorist gangsters have brought them nothing but trouble.

The diplomats and officials will of course dismiss the possibilities of spreading democracy and freedom in the Middle East as remote, but, of course, they were saying the same thing about Eastern Europe back during the Cold War. And one good way to make sure that the Arabs stay under the boot of dictators is for the diplomats and officials and the Times constantly to dismiss the possibility of change or to not even consider the possibility.

In fact, the headline on today's story -- "Quest for Mideast Peace: How and Why It Failed" -- is unwittingly apt. The reason the quest failed was not, as the article claims, because of Israeli intransigence, but because the diplomats clung -- and still cling -- so persistently to their assumption that Israel can achieve peace by negotiating with an unfree, undemocratic, terrorist partner. Today's Times article, for all its flaws, is a useful contribution because it illuminates how persistently the diplomats and officials and their stenographers at the Times cling to that assumption in the face of the mountain of evidence that contradicts it.

School Evaluation: An editorial in today's New York Times defends the New York City schools chancellor in his refusal to implement a Compstat system under which superintendents and principals would be held accountable in weekly meetings. The Times writes, "The most obvious difference between the police and the school system has to do with the data being collected. The Police Department's Compstat meetings focus on crime data that comes in daily, with the aim of getting officers to tamp down minor outbreaks of crimes before they harden into trends. By contrast, the math and reading scores on which superintendent evaluations will partly depend come from standardized tests that are administered only twice a year." This is pure excuse-making. There are any number of school-performance measures that could be tracked on a daily or weekly basis: student attendance, teacher attendance, crime in schools, leaks in school roofs, student performance on quizzes, grades on homework.

The Times writes, "Surely the schools chancellor is in the best position to judge what approach will work best." Why defer so much to a chancellor who heads a failing system?

Note: Smartertimes.com is in Massachusetts today and is operating off the New England edition of the New York Times.

An article on the front of the business section of today's New York Times reports on the promotion of a Merrill Lynch executive, E. Stanley O'Neal. The executive, the Times tells readers in the first paragraph of the news article, "could become the first black to lead a major Wall Street securities firm."

The Times seems to think that this is important enough to include in the first paragraph of the news article. But then the paper leaves the matter unexplored for the next 23 paragraphs, returning to it in the final two paragraphs in the story, which reports, "For his part, Mr. O'Neal prefers not to make an issue of his race." This is laughable. Would the Times ever report that anyone does "prefer" to make an issue of his own race? From the evidence in this story, the one who prefers to make an issue of Mr. O'Neal's race is the New York Times, and one way of doing so is with remarks like that one.

Smartertimes.com isn't suggesting that there is no room for substantive, nuanced reporting on racial dynamics on Wall Street -- the Times won a Pulitzer Prize this year for just that sort of reporting in its series on race. But the sort of glancing, gawking commentary in today's article doesn't meet that standard. If the newspaper wanted to get into the race issue, it could have had a story with reaction from other blacks on Wall Street or from critics of the lack of racial diversity on Wall Street or with quotes from Mr. O'Neal on the issue. As it is, the Times's handling of the story -- observing breathlessly that he "could become the first black to lead a major Wall Street securities firm," while then later remarking that he "prefers not to make an issue of his race" -- is clumsy and not very useful to readers or to Mr. O'Neal.

Note: Smartertimes.com is in Massachusetts today and is operating off the New England edition of the New York Times.

A dispatch from Castel Gandolfo on the front page of today's New York Times reports on President Bush, the pope, and research on stem cells taken from embryos. "For religious conservatives, as well as many of the Catholic voters Mr. Bush is wooing, there are no shadings, and the decision is a kind of litmus test of the president's loyalty to their cause," the Times reports. No shadings for the Times, either, apparently, at least when it comes to assessing religious conservatives.

Dishonest: In his column on the op-ed page of today's New York Times, Thomas Friedman accuses proponents of missile defense of being dishonest. Here's Mr. Friedman: "Look at the Republican arms expert Richard Perle's Senate testimony last week. He was trying to justify why we need missile defense against rogue leaders, who, he claimed, cannot be deterred by the classic doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD), which has kept the peace for 50 years. '[Some say] you can count on Saddam to be deterred by our deterrent,' said Mr. Perle. 'I frankly don't want to count on the rational judgment of a man who used poison gas against his own people.'"

Mr. Friedman continues: "Let's dissect that statement. Mr. Perle is comparing the Iraqi people to the American people, and suggesting that since Saddam used gas against his own people, you never know, he may do the same to us. Well, there is one small difference between us and the Iraqi people: We have nuclear weapons to retaliate with and they did not. During the gulf war Saddam had poison gas warheads. He was warned by the elder President Bush that if he used that poison gas against U.S. troops, his regime would be wiped off the planet. And he didn't use it. Not only did he not use it against our troops in a war on his own border, with his whole regime and maybe his own life in the balance, he did not even put poison gas on the Scuds he fired at Israel, which would have been enormously popular in the Arab world. Why not? Classic deterrence. He knew the Israelis would destroy Baghdad."

Mr. Friedman continues: "This gets to the core problem with the Bush approach to missile defense. It is based on flimsy or dishonest arguments. . ."

Well, while Mr. Friedman is busy congratulating himself on the fact that his MAD doctrine meant that Saddam "did not even put poison gas on the Scuds he fired at Israel," how about pausing for a moment to remember the effect of those Scuds on Israel. According to Mitchell Bard (http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/Gulf_War.html): "The damage caused by the 39 Iraqi Scud missiles that landed in Tel Aviv and Haifa was extensive. Approximately 3,300 apartments and other buildings were affected in the greater Tel Aviv area. Some 1,150 people who were evacuated had to be housed at a dozen hotels at a cost of $20,000 per night. Beyond the direct costs of military preparedness and damage to property, the Israeli economy was also hurt by the inability of many Israelis to work under the emergency conditions. The economy functioned at no more than 75 percent of normal capacity during the war, resulting in a net loss to the country of $3.2 billion. The biggest cost was in human lives. A total of 74 people died as a consequence of Scud attacks. Two died in direct hits, four from suffocation in gas masks and the rest from heart attacks (Jerusalem Post, January 17, 1992)."

Talk about your flimsy or dishonest arguments. For Mr. Friedman to write a column dismissing missile defense based on how well MAD worked during the Gulf War, without even mentioning the 74 deaths and $3.2 billion in damages Israel suffered as a result of the 39 conventionally armed Scud missiles that landed there, is just breathtaking. That's aside from the effect the Scuds had against American forces based in Saudi Arabia. A missile defense could neutralize this threat, which is why Israeli governments both Labor and Likud have supported missile defense development and deployment. Mr. Friedman may be willing to rely on MAD, but, hey, he's out of Scud range -- at least for now.

Furthermore, if Saddam is as rational as Mr. Friedman claims and would therefore never use biological, chemical or nuclear weapons against Israel or America (mutual assured destruction, remember?) -- then why is he devoting such vast resources to developing such weapons? There are at least three possibilities: 1. Saddam's going to use the weapons, in which case Mr. Friedman is wrong about MAD and the need for missile defense. 2. Saddam's building weapons that have no use to him, at great cost, in which case Mr. Friedman is wrong about how rational Saddam is and Mr. Perle is right about how irrational Saddam is. 3. Saddam thinks that just having the weapons, without using them, will give him a strategic advantage that is worth the cost. In this case, Mr. Friedman may be right that Saddam is rational but he's still wrong (and Mr. Perle is right) about the need for missile defense, which would rob Saddam of the strategic advantage of having the missiles.

Late Again: The New York Times waddles in this morning with the news that police may interview Rep. Gary Condit for a fourth time about missing intern Chandra Levy. The Los Angeles Times had this news on Friday; the Washington Post had it yesterday; today's New York Times doesn't acknowledge the earlier reports.

Can't Spell: A front-page article in today's New York Times about the climate change negotiations refers to "Paula Dobrianksy, the under secretary of state for global affairs." The correct spelling of her last name is Dobriansky; the Times has it wrong.

Note: Smartertimes.com is in Massachusetts and is operating today off the New York Times online edition.