The front page of today's New York Times carries an appropriately skeptical dispatch on ethanol, referring to "persistent doubts about its economic and environmental benefits" and quoting an expert who describes it as "a program to help farmers at the expense of another sector of the economy." The article even refers to Archer Daniels Midland Company as "a major campaign contributor to both parties" -- an improvement over the June 12 New York Times ethanol report, which, as Smartertimes noted at the time, identified ADM only as "a major Republican contributor."

Alas, the New York Times's welcome skepticism about subsidy-seeking farmers doesn't carry over into the fawning "Public Lives" profile in today's paper of George McGovern. The Times reports that Mr. McGovern "lobbies for his favorite cause, cutting world hunger." And that he is "asking Congress to send more surplus food overseas in global school-lunch programs." The article mentions that the legislation has the support of Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, and that it is named after Mr. McGovern and former Senator Bob Dole.

There's not even a hint of recognition in the Public Lives profile that what Mr. McGovern, Mr. Dole and Mr. Daschle are up to here is not so much about "cutting world hunger" but about helping farmers -- in the memorable phrase of the ethanol article -- at the expense of another sector of the economy. Mr. McGovern and Mr. Daschle are both from the farm state of South Dakota, and Mr. Dole is from Kansas.

Mr. McGovern, in particular, is just not credible on the hunger-reduction issue. If he was such an implacable foe of hunger, why did he spend his political career advocating a soft line against the Soviet Union, which was one of the foremost creators of famine in human history? And why has he been such a fierce critic of Israel? In 1993, the Middle East Policy Council, an anti-Israel outfit of which Mr. McGovern was president, called on the U.S Government "not only to withhold planned disbursements of loan guarantees to Israel but also to reduce or suspend its regular military and economic assistance and to impose trade sanctions," as Michael Curtis pointed out in the June 1998 issue of Middle East Quarterly. With its dry-farming techniques and kibbutz-developed irrigation technology, Israel has done far more to fight hunger than Mr. McGovern could ever hope to accomplish.

The Times leaves unchallenged this notion of sending "more surplus food overseas." The reason the food is "surplus" is that the American government is paying farmers to produce more of it than there is a market demand for. And while shipping it overseas may help in crisis relief, the money may well be better spent in the long term by teaching the people of hungry countries about new techniques in sustainable agriculture so that they can grow their own food. Or the money could be spent on overthrowing the unfree regimes that are contributing to the starvation of their own people, the way the Soviet Union did back when Mr. McGovern was undermining America's efforts to confront it.

'Positive': A "news analysis" on the front page of today's New York Times reports on President Bush's dealings with Russia. One paragraph in the piece says, "On the positive side, Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin have agreed to begin high-level talks on antimissile systems and offensive nuclear arms. The United States has temporarily put aside its talk of withdrawing from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, a move that would create a political uproar in Europe, while Russia is playing down its threat to respond by putting multiple warheads on its missiles as a way to build up its offensive striking power." This ventures beyond "analysis" into partisan opinion. What is "positive" about putting aside, even temporarily, talk of withdrawing from an outmoded treaty that is preventing America from testing and deploying a missile defense? There are lots of people who would report that as "on the negative side."

Head Start Cuts: An editorial in today's New York Times runs under the headline "Unhealthy Cuts for Head Start." It criticizes President Bush for a "shortsighted" effort to make the "cuts" referred to in the headline -- a reduction in the "funding per child." But as the editorial itself acknowledges, Mr. Bush "is proposing a modest increase in overall financing" for Head Start, and projects "enrollment increases." In other words, Mr. Bush wants to spend more money on Head Start than President Clinton did, and he wants to include more children in the program. The Times response to that is to criticize Mr. Bush for "unhealthy cuts." It's just silly to look at this on a per-child basis, because Head Start isn't a universally guaranteed entitlement. It's as if the federal housing program consisted of giving one poor person a 32-room mansion on 320 acres, and President Bush proposed reforming it to spend more money and give 36 persons each a studio apartment on 10 acres. The Times response, by the logic of today's editorial, would be to condemn the president for "unhealthy cuts" in funding per poor-person.

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

An article in the international section of today's New York Times reports on anti-missile weapons in outer space. "Those programs were once at the center of the Strategic Defense Initiative, derided by opponents as Star Wars," the Times says.

What's the headline on this Times story? "Cast of Star Wars Makes Comeback in Bush Plan."

Smartertimes.com isn't suggesting that Star Wars be banned as a reference to missile defense in news coverage. But the combination of today's headline and the line in the story sure does suggest that among those "opponents" deriding space-based missile-defense are the headline writers in the news department of the New York Times, who are supposed to maintain at least a pretense of neutrality on the question.

Uncompetitive: The lead, front-page news story in today's New York Times is a dispatch from the G-8 summit at Genoa, Italy. "Mr. Bush has countered the protesters by insisting that ever freer trade is the answer to the problems facing developing nations, though never once here has he explored the side effects on countries unable to compete with the richest nations," the Times reports. This sentence contains so many wrongheaded assumptions that it's hard to know where to start. Perhaps the most glaring is the phrase "unable to compete." Talk about your soft bigotry of low expectations. No country is inherently "unable to compete." Some may be saddled with oppressive governments and may lack natural resources, but it's overly pessimistic to write them off as "unable to compete." The juxtaposition with "the richest nations" makes it sound like the "unable to compete" nations the Times is talking about are the poor nations. But in fact, labor costs tend to be lower in these poor nations than they are in rich nations. So free trade means those poor nations will probably benefit as jobs move there from rich nations. The rich nations benefit, too, as their consumers can pay lower prices for goods made with lower labor costs. If anything, the "side effects" of free trade may be worse in those "richest nations," where there are some job losses as work moves overseas. Finally, how does the Times know that Mr. Bush has "never once" explored this question? Isn't it possible he did so privately and the newspaper just hasn't heard about it?

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

An article on the front page of today's New York Times reports on the killing of a protester at the G-8 summit. "The killing in Genoa, a medieval seaport converted into a 21st-century citadel, is the first death during an anti-globalization demonstration since the movement tempestuously surfaced at a World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999," the Times reports. That's written clumsily enough to make it sound like someone died at the protests in Seattle in 1999. In fact, as a letter from Seattle Mayor Paul Schell noted at the end of the 1999 WTO meeting, "No one was killed. No one was seriously injured." The letter is available online at http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/wto/sm_120699.htm.

Blowing Smoke: A dispatch from Prague in the business section of today's New York Times reports "anti-smoking groups and government officials are indignant that Philip Morris commissioned a report for the Czech government arguing that smokers saved the state millions of dollars by dying prematurely." Judging by the tone of the article, it seems the Times is indignant, too: "The Czech government and press and anti-smoking groups worldwide reacted in outrage," the Times reports, quoting critics who called the report "first-class cynicism and hyena-ism," and "ethically unacceptable." Moreover, the Times asserts that "The report is certain to bolster the cause of anti-smoking campaigners in the United States." It quotes one such anti-smoking campaigner as saying, "A company that goes out of its way to rationalize as a good thing the fact that its products kill people doesn't deserve a seat at the table."

Well, the Times doesn't mention it in its own article, but by these silly standards, the New York Times itself is guilty of "hyena-ism" and "doesn't deserve a seat at the table." After all, the New York Times magazine on Sunday, April 7, 1996, ran an article titled"A Peace Plan for the Cigarette Wars," which called a "half-truth" the notion that "Smokers impose a heavy tax burden on the rest of us through Medicaid and other public expenditures to treat their smoking-related diseases." The Times magazine article noted, "Although the typical smoker, absorbing, say, 200 hits a day of an abrasive, toxic agent for years, naturally runs up a higher lifetime medical bill than the nonsmoker, that lifetime is on average eight years shorter. This means that smokers are not around long enough to collect many of the benefits -- Social Security and Medicare, as well as private pension and health-care payments -- that other Americans do."

The 1996 Times article continued: "Not surprisingly, this dubious blessing smokers bestow on their countrymen is rarely cited by either the industry or its critics. The latter, furthermore, almost never mention the offsetting value of the Federal, state and local cigarette taxes paid by smokers. In Massachusetts, according to the Tobacco Institute, smokers paid $237 million in 1994 under the state's 51-cents-a-pack tax, well above the $200 million in public health-care costs that Attorney General Harshbarger is suing the cigarette makers to recover. The most highly regarded study on the subject, conducted for the Rand Corporation and published in 1991 by Harvard University Press, found that smokers' true net cost to society was 15 cents a pack. The figure was later raised to 33 cents in 1995 dollars in studies by the Congressional Research Service and independent scholars, far less than the national average of 52 cents a pack that smokers were then paying in taxes."

In other words, the Times reports on this controversy in Prague about the Philip Morris stuff without noting that the cost-benefit analysis was roughly accurate and reported uncontroversially in the New York Times five years ago. Talk about hyena-ism!

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

A front-page, above-the-fold article in today's New York Times mentions that "Johns Hopkins receives more federal research money than any other university, $310 million last year." The newspaper gives no source for that claim. Figures from the National Science Foundation indeed rank Johns Hopkins at the top of the research money list -- but the figures, available online in PDF format at http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf01323/pdf/fssb11.pdf, put the sum at $855 million. If the number were $310 million, Johns Hopkins would rank seventh. There are also plenty of accounting games being played here. If you treat the University of California as one entity rather than as separate campuses, its combined federal research dollars far surpass those of Johns Hopkins -- and even more so if you add in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that the University of California runs on a federal contract. If you count grants made to Harvard Medical School's teaching hospitals like Mass. General and Brigham & Women's as part of Harvard's money, Harvard's ranking gets a boost. As usual, the Times article about the Johns Hopkins research scandal manages studiously to avoid any mention of the university's chairman, who just happens to be running for mayor of New York City.

Lost at Sea: The weekend section of today's New York Times carries an article about rowboats. "This fantasy is a departure from my usual approach to boats, which is to avoid bright work (the lovely varnished wood you see on elegant wooden yachts) at all costs," the Times article says. "Bright work has to be regularly maintained (read varnished)."

Merriam-Webster's online collegiate dictionary defines brightwork (one word) as "polished or plated metalwork." Webster's New World, the Times newsroom dictionary, defines it (one word) as "shiny metal trim or fittings." The American Heritage dictionary online defines it as "metal parts or fixtures made bright by polishing." You do see varnished wood occasionally referred to as bright work in a nautical context, but, as the dictionary definitions indicate, the term is much more commonly accepted as a description of the cleats and other metal hardware that are attached to the wood. If the Times is going to write with a relatively obscure usage like this in place of the more commonly accepted one, it would be easier on readers if, in defining the term, some reference were made to the more common usage.

Personal Price: The sports section of today's New York Times reports on its front page, under the headline "Hamm Pays Personal Price for Soccer," the fact that soccer star Mia Hamm and her husband have begun divorce proceedings. Would the Times puts a male athlete's divorce on the front of the section with a headline claiming the man had paid a personal price for whatever sport he plays? Would it do the same thing on the front of the business section to a male corporate executive? Even if Ms. Hamm herself blames her soccer career for the divorce, the treatment seems unusual.

An article in the national section of today's New York Times runs under the headline "Child Well-Being Improves, U.S. Says." The article reports that "In 1999, 16 percent of the nation's children lived in families below the poverty line." But the article fails to report that, after government assistance like the earned-income tax credit and food stamps is taken into account, the percentage of children in poverty falls to more like 10.9 percent.

The article also reports that "In one measure of the strong economy of the 90's, the percentage of children living in households with at least one employed parent rose to 79 percent in 1999, from 77 percent in 1998 and 72 percent in 1994." Isn't it possible that that shift is not only "one measure of the strong economy of the 90's" but one measure of the success of welfare reform?

Late Again: A front-page, above-the-fold news article in today's New York Times reports that Senator Frist, a Republican from Tennessee, supports federal financing for research on embryonic stem cells. That's old news to readers of the Wall Street Journal, which had this story yesterday under the headline "Influential GOP Sen. Frist Supports Stem-Cell Research." Today's Times doesn't mention the fact that the story appeared in yesterday's Journal.

One-Sided Story: A five-paragraph item by the Associated Press in the international section of today's New York Times runs under the headline "Japan Charges U.S. Serviceman With Rape." An ABCNews.com story reporting the same event reports in its third paragraph that the American "has denied the charge, claiming he had consensual sex with the woman." A Reuters story on the same topic reports in its second paragraph that the American "said he had consensual sex with the woman but denied rape." But the Times today reports the accusation against the American without including his response.

Misplaced Modifier: A dispatch from Cairo in the international section of today's New York Times begins, "In a high-profile crackdown on suspected homosexual activity that has been condemned by some legal activists and human rights groups, 52 men were charged today in a state security court with engaging in immoral acts or religious offenses." This makes it sound like the legal activists and human rights groups are condemning the homosexual activity, or that the crackdown is confined to homosexual activity that has been condemned by legal activists and human rights groups. In fact, what the human rights groups and legal activists are condemning is the crackdown.

Vulcanization: A dispatch from Birmingham, Alabama, in the national section of today's New York Times reports that the Senate approved by a vote of 87 to 12 a plan to spend $3 million on restoring a 56-foot tall statue of the Roman god Vulcan. The Times doesn't tell its readers in today's story how New York's senators voted on the issue. Smartertimes.com checked the Senate roll call and, sure enough, Senator Schumer and Senator Clinton backed the $3 million face lift for the Roman god in Alabama. Your tax dollars at work.

The international section of today's New York Times carries, under the headline "Senator Says Most Americans Want Controls on Light Arms," what amounts to an article-length press release from Senator Feinstein, a Democrat from California.

The article, datelined "United Nations," says Ms. Feinstein "challenged the frequently repeated assertions by American officials here that the Second Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed individuals the right to own guns. 'Mr. Bolton's position on the Second Amendment is in direct contradiction to decades of Supreme Court precedent,' she said. 'Not one single gun-control law has ever been overturned by the court on Second Amendment grounds.'"

Well, the Times doesn't bother to give John Bolton or any gun-rights advocates the chance to respond to Senator Feinstein. The Times doesn't even bother to give "Mr. Bolton's" first name or his title or what government agency he works for. (He's under secretary of state for arms control and international security.)

So it falls to Smartertimes.com to point out that Senator Feinstein is off base. In fact, NRA lawyers cite several Supreme Court decisions -- United States v. Cruikshank, Presser v. Illinois, Robertson v. Baldwin, Moore v. City of East Cleveland, United States v. Verdugo-Urquirdez -- confirming that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to own guns. That right is not unlimited, but it exists.

And as for the senator's claim that "Not one single gun-control law has ever been overturned by the court on Second Amendment grounds," check out the New York Times's own coverage from June 28, 1997. Under a headline reading, "Justices Limit Brady Gun Law as Intrusion on States' Rights," the Times reported that the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, struck down the background-check provision of the 1993 gun-control law. While it's true the majority decision was grounded in states' rights and not the Second Amendment, the Times reported at the time that "There were several separate concurring and dissenting opinions today. One of the more interesting was by Justice Thomas, who said that given the Second Amendment's reference to 'the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,' he doubted whether Congress had the power to regulate intrastate gun sales at all." Given that Justice Thomas was one of those votes in a five-vote majority overturning a gun-control law, Senator Feinstein's claim seems a stretch.

In today's otherwise pro-gun control article, the Times does manage to sneak in a puzzling line. "In her Senate speech on Monday, Ms. Feinstein questioned the Bush administration's position opposing international agreements on the grounds that they could constrain legal American arms sales, which are well-policed." This could just be sloppy writing, but it sure could be interpreted to say that the New York Times news department is now claiming that legal American arms sales are "well-policed." That would be surprising, given Times editorials like last year's one titled "The Scourge of Guns," which claimed, "We live in a nation awash in guns where more than 30,000 Americans die annually by gunfire, a toll that includes about 4,000 children and teenagers. Yet despite these horrible statistics, Americans are allowed, as in few other industrialized countries, to buy and keep an unlimited arsenal of firearms with very few restrictions and little government regulation." Some more attribution -- for instance, "which the Bush administration says are well-policed" -- would fix this problem.

An editorial in today's New York Times says that boost-phase intercept systems -- in which an enemy missile is destroyed in the launch phase, over enemy soil -- "have some clear technological and diplomatic advantages" over other missile defense possibilities.

"They home in on an enemy missile when it is still moving relatively slowly, is unlikely to be surrounded by decoys and is trailed by a hot and bright plume of rocket exhaust," the Times says. Fair enough.

Then the Times says, "The interceptor rockets, whether based on land or sea, would need to be situated very close to the specific countries being defended against and would pose no threat to the missile forces of other countries, like Russia and China." This sentence is full of flawed assumptions. For one thing, it totally ignores the most promising boost-phase intercept technology: space-based lasers. The speed of a laser reduces the "very close" problem, and a space-based laser system could be used against Chinese or Russian missiles as easily as against Iranian, Iraqi or North Korean missiles -- or even, in the worst case, against an accidental American launch.

The Times seems to see as an "advantage" a system's inability to be used against China or Russia. (The next sentence of the editorial, after the one about how the systems pose no threat to China or Russia, begins "but these systems also have important drawbacks.") That is absurd. Russia has the most nuclear missiles aimed at America, and Communist China's missile threat is so serious that the president of free China on Taiwan is beseeching America to join it in missile defense. A ship-based theater missile-defense on an Aegis cruiser may be enough to defend Taiwan, but the Times editorialists earlier came out against selling even that to the free Chinese. If America is going to spend the money and technological effort to develop and deploy a missile defense, it might as well be one that doesn't leave us vulnerable to penetration by a Chinese or Russian missile launch. When and if such a missile hits an American city, it sure will be interesting to watch the Times editorialists explain how our defenselessness constitutes an "advantage."

The lead, front-page story in today's New York Times reports that "In California, where record electricity prices and local blackouts captured national attention for months, wholesale power prices have fallen to the lowest levels in more than a year. Analysts credit new power supplies, a state-led conservation effort and federal price controls for averting what many had feared would be a catastrophic summer of scarcity."

Wow. How about that. Federal price controls have averted "what many had feared would be a catastrophic summer of scarcity." Given how this defies the standard rules of economics, it sure seems worthy of front-page play -- if it's true.

But that's a big "if." Especially if you remember a July 4, 2001, article that ran in the New York Times national section under the headline, "U.S. Price Controls Are Said To Worsen Power Shortage." That article reported: "state and utility officials said the federal price restraints, put in place on June 19 after months of vigorous debate, seemed to have had the perverse effect of reducing supplies when they were most needed."

The two articles contradict each other. Today's says the price controls averted scarcity; the July 4 one said the price controls reduced supplies. If the Times news department is going to do such a full reversal on the matter of price controls, it would be nice if it offered readers an explanation. If the reversal is not merely a matter of the beliefs of the Times news department but in fact reflects some independent reality in the world outside the Times newsroom, it would be nice to have an explanation of that, too. How can the same policy that on July 4 was reducing supplies have the effect on July 16 of averting scarcity?

A column on the front page of the City section of today's New York Times concludes with a quote, in all seriousness, from one of the Times's carefully picked experts. The topic is the New York subway system, and the claim is that "The No. 7 is probably the best-known line outside of New York. It's a symbol of the diversity of New York." This is absurd, and it's hard to see why the Times would pass it along unchallenged. John Rocker may have lent some recent fame to the 7 train. But the Rocker incident pales in comparison to the attention that the A train has attracted over the years as a result of the Billy Strayhorn song "Take the 'A' Train," famously recorded by Duke Ellington.

Lost in Boston: A photo in today's New York Times magazine is described as being of "The Kennedy clan at the dedication of the J.F.K. Library in Boston in 1979." The building the clan is standing in front of sure doesn't look like the Kennedy library.

The front page of today's New York Times carries an article under the headline "U.S. Set to Oppose International Plan for Cleaner Energy." The article contains quotes from three persons: an unnamed Bush administration official, a Clinton administration official named Dan Reicher, and a woman identified only as "Daphne Wysham, a fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington."

Never mind the ridiculous headline: The Bush administration isn't opposed to cleaner energy, it is just opposed to the government ramming it down the throats of consumers regardless of the cost. If you want to consume cleaner energy, the Bush administration isn't going to stop you.

And never mind the odd definition of "clean" and "nonpolluting" energy -- "wind, water and the sun." Generating energy from these sources can require building dams and covering virgin hillsides with windmills and solar panels -- not exactly "clean" by the definition of many environmentalists.

The really fascinating question is how a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies came to be the only expert quoted in this Times article. There's no quote from the energy industry, no quote from a conservative or free-market think tank that might support the Bush administration's position. A reader not steeped in the details of the issue might think the Institute for Policy Studies was some centrist research institute with no particular ideological tilt.

In fact, a May 15 article in the Washington Post identified the Institute for Policy Studies as "left-leaning." The Institute for Policy Studies Web site is littered with slogans like "Six Months Since the Coup, and Bush is Still Illegitimate" and references to "the illegality of NATO's attack on Yugoslavia." Ms. Wysham turns out to be the former editor in chief of Greenpeace magazine, the publication of the radical environmental group.

The closest the Times comes to a reason for including the Institute for Policy Studies's perspective in this article is a reference to a study the group did that found, the Times said, that "the export promotion agencies of rich nations, like the Export-Import Bank of the United States, are the world's largest public backers of fossil fuels, the main causes of global warming." Never mind that the notion that fossil fuels are "the main causes of global warming" is still hotly debated in scientific and policy circles and is hardly the sort of thing that one would want to state as fact without attribution in a news article. This "study" that the Times makes so much of in today's front-page article appears to be one that was issued April 28, 1999. It's available in PDF format at http://www.foe.org/international/climatesummary.pdf. In other words, it's more than two years old. Funny how a study like that becomes front-page news all of a sudden once a Republican administration with ties to the oil industry gets into office.

Smartertimes.com isn't saying that the New York Times shouldn't report on the Institute for Policy Studies and what its staff has to say. But why not label the group as "left-leaning" the way the Times constantly labels conservative groups as "conservative"? And there's no good reason -- in a story this complex, where industry and consumers have interests -- that the only expert quoted should be a Greenpeace type. Why not give Times readers the benefit of some other perspectives in addition to those of the hard-left environmentalists?

Wartime: An editorial in today's New York Times, under the headline "Misguided Sanctions," opposes the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act. "Calling foreign companies to account for otherwise legal business conducted outside American borders goes a step too far," the editorial says. "It forces countries to pick sides in a way that is more appropriate to wartime than to commerce." Hello? America is in a war with Iran and Libya. If the Times needs confirmation of that, it might check with Stephen Flatow, the New Jersey man whose daughter Alisa was killed in 1995 what a federal court has ruled was an Iranian-funded terror attack. Or it could check with Susan Cohen, the New Jersey woman whose daughter Theodora died on Pan Am 103 when it was bombed by Libyan intelligence agents. Or it could check with the families of the 19 Americans killed in the Khobar Towers bombing at Dharan, Saudi Arabia, in 1996, an attack in which there is strong evidence of Iranian involvement.

The national section of today's New York Times carries an article under the headline "Panel Calls for Higher Mileage Standards." The article reports that a House of Representatives subcommittee has approved a bill "to force automobile companies to improve the mileage of sport-utility vehicles" and minivans.

The article includes one quote from a congressman who favors the bill, another quote from a congressman who says it doesn't go far enough, and one quote from a representative of the Sierra Club. No representative of the automobile industry is named or quoted, nor is any economist or auto-safety expert who could speak to the likely effect of the new fuel economy standards on safety. The closest the article comes is a reference, in a single paragraph, to unnamed "critics."

The Brookings Institution's Robert Crandall and Harvard's John Graham have estimated that the current fuel economy standards on cars could be responsible for a 14 to 27 percent increase in highway fatalities. The smaller cars that are manufactured to meet the standard tend to be less safe in collisions. A recent study in the American Journal of Public Health on "Causal Influence of Car Mass and Size on Driver Fatality Risk," supports the idea that heavier cars are safer, and that the net safety benefits for drivers of heavier cars outweighs the risks to those who are hit by them. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has projected out the Crandall-Graham work to show that the current fuel economy standards can be blamed for thousands of auto deaths each year.

Of course, there are safety risks associated with pollution, too, and if safety were the only issue, we'd all be walking or driving around in tanks. But in a story with so many sides to it, it's just weird that the Sierra Club is the only interest group with a voice in the Times article.

In an e-mail to Smartertimes.com, the New York Times offers the following in response to yesterday's Smartertimes.com questioning the Times's unattributed claim that Nevada "has the nation's highest rate of asthma":

"fyi, you cited the wrong cdc report.

here's the one with the information. Nevada is listed as having the greatest estimated percentage on a state-by-state basis -- 7.2 percent -- though admittedly it's based on self-reported cases of asthma, and on census figures now out of date.

http://www.cdc.gov/epo/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00055803.htm

we had some of the same questions and revised the story for later editions, one you clearly did not receive.

hope this helps.

cheers"

Well, this is progress. The Times has now done what it didn't do for its readers -- cite the exact source for its claim that Nevada has "the nation's highest rate of asthma." The editor of Smartertimes.com eagerly clicked through to the report cited by the Times at the link above -- only to find a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report titled "Forecasted State-Specific Estimates of Self-Reported Asthma Prevalence -- United States, 1998."

Aha. Now, this may be a concept beyond the comprehension of the editors at the New York Times, but "forecasted" asthma "estimates" are not the same as asthma rates. The CDC study the Times now cites doesn't actually count asthma cases -- it interviews a regional sample and estimates how many cases a state would have if the characteristics of the sample held true for the state. In the statistics talk of the Times-cited study: "Using methods that have been applied elsewhere to forecast cancer rates, state-specific asthma prevalence estimates for 1998 were calculated using a three-step procedure: 1) race-, sex-, and age-specific asthma prevalence rates were calculated for each of the four U.S. census regions using data from the 1995 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS); 2) each state's 1998 demographic composition as estimated by the Bureau of Census was multiplied by the corresponding regional prevalences; and 3) linear extrapolations of region-specific increases in asthma prevalence from 1980 to 1994 were applied to the 3-year period from 1995 to 1998 for each state."

And as the CDC report the Times now cites makes clear, "The findings in this report are subject to at least two limitations." The most important of these is that "these results are based on the assumption that age, sex, and race-specific rates of asthma do not vary within any of the four geographic regions of the United States. Each state's estimated prevalence reflects its regional placement in the United States and its demographic composition. These analyses do not account for differences among states in the relative presence or absence of environmental risk factors in asthma prevalence, possible differences in genetic susceptibility toward the condition, or other sociodemographic indicators (e.g., poverty status). As a result, these findings underestimate the variability in asthma prevalence between states within regions."

Even if the Times wants to claim that these "forecasted estimates" are the same as an asthma rate, there's another problem with that claim that Nevada has "the nation's highest rate of asthma." As the CDC study the Times cites in its own defense states plainly, "Differences in asthma prevalence rates between states were not significant. By region, 1-year period prevalence estimates ranged from 6.4% to 6.8% in the Northeast, 5.8% to 6.1% in the South, 6.6% to 6.7% in the Midwest, and 6.0% to 7.2% in the West." Here's how the New York Times, on September 28, 2000, interpreted a Los Angeles Times poll that showed George W. Bush with a six-point lead over Al Gore among likely voters: "since the margin of sampling error is plus or minus four percentage points, the findings have to be considered a statistical tie." (The four points apply to both Mr. Bush's support and to Mr. Gore's, so the six points are within the eight-point range.) The CDC forecast itself says the state-to-state differences within regions were "not significant." The forecasted rates are close enough that, if it were a political poll showing a Republican in the lead, the Times would probably call it a "statistical tie."

And the New York Times claims that Smartertimes.com cited the "wrong report"?

In fact, unlike the report the Times cites, the one Smartertimes.com cited yesterday, at http://www.cdc.gov/epo/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00052262.htm, is not based on "estimates" or "forecasts" but on actual reports of causes of death. That report shows a much greater state-to-state variance in death from asthma, and it doesn't support the claim that Nevada "has the nation's highest rate of asthma."

So, just to sum up, the Times has taken "forecasted estimates" that a study says are "not significant" and turned them into the claim that Nevada "has the nation's highest rate of asthma." It didn't tell its readers about another study showing that several states have higher rates of actual reported deaths from asthma. And when challenged on the point, the newspaper's response is not to run a correction, but to tell Smartertimes.com, "you cited the wrong cdc report." The whole episode is just a wonderful little case study in the Times's carelessness and arrogance.

An item in the National Briefing column in the national section of today's New York Times reports that Nevada, "which has the nation's highest rate of asthma," is being faulted "for not tracking the disease." The article runs under the header "Nevada: State Chided for Lack of Asthma Data." It goes on to report that state officials say asthma has killed 330 Nevada residents since 1990 and that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that "slightly more than 7 percent of Nevada's residents have asthma."

Well, if the state knows exactly how many people died of asthma and what percentage of residents have it, then how can it be faulted for "lack of asthma data" and for "not tracking the disease"? And how can the Times be so sure that the state has "the nation's highest rate of asthma" if the state isn't tracking the disease or collecting data on it? In fact, the claim that Nevada has "the nation's highest rate of asthma" -- a claim for which the Times cites no source -- is questionable. An April 24, 1998, report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention listed the rates of asthma as the underlying cause of death among whites from 1990 to 1995. Nevada's rate was 15.8 deaths per million population -- below New York (17.0), Nebraska (23.0), Arizona (20.4), Hawaii (23.3), and New Mexico (22.9), among others. If you don't believe Smartertimes.com, you can go check out the report at http://www.cdc.gov/epo/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00052262.htm. While rate of death from asthma is not the same as rate of asthma, there's no reason to believe that the deadliness of asthma would be much greater in Arizona than in Nevada. And in general, death-related statistics are more reliable than those gathered by calling up a sample of individuals and interviewing them about whether they have asthma or not.

Why is the Times picking on Nevada? Perhaps it is still grasping at straws to support its claim in a front-page May 19, 2001, news article that "In Nevada, these experts say, a long legacy of low-tax, libertarian government, rural isolation and a steely tradition of self-reliance have combined with a population growth of more than 60 percent in the last decade that has left little sense of community to create huge challenges to the state's mental and physical health."

How, then, to explain that high asthma rate in New York, which doesn't exactly suffer from a "low-tax, libertarian government"?

A news article in the national section of today's New York Times reports, "Last year, the average metropolitan area worker collected $38,000 in wages and benefits, compared with a nonmetropolitan area worker who earned $24,800. In a troubling sign, the income gap between metro and nonmetro workers has increased to $13,200 per worker from $4,600 in 1985."

The Times news article doesn't explain why this "income gap" is "troubling." Or who, other than the Times news department, is troubled by it. Would the Times prefer that workers in metro areas make exactly the same amount as workers in rural areas, even if food and housing expenses are higher in cities? How would the newspaper propose to eradicate this "troubling" gap? By taxing the city-dwellers and transferring the money to the country folk? Is the gap "troubling" even if the real wages of rural Americans have grown since 1985, and the real wages of urban Americans have just grown more rapidly? Why doesn't the news article just tell us the facts about income and leave it to the editorials or to experts quoted in the story or to readers to opine about whether the numbers are "troubling"?

The Mayor's Preference: An editorial in today's New York Times refers to "New York City, which Mr. Bush visited only once during the campaign and whose mayor clearly preferred Senator John McCain's candidacy." "Clearly preferred"? Check out this headline from the October 2, 1999, New York Times: "Giuliani Endorses Bush for President."

Outer Space: The World Briefing column in the international section of today's New York Times, usually organized by region, today contains a heading that says "Outer Space." In it is an item that has something to do with broomstick-riding "White Witches" in Britain. Since these witches -- or any broomstick rider -- never made it into outer space, the Times might do better to abandon the attempt at whimsical humor and just stick the item in the "Europe" section.

Lower Prices: A headline in the business section of today's New York Times says, "If Comcast Buys AT&T Cable, Efficiency Is Likely to Improve; But Consumers Probably Won't See Lower Prices." As one Smartertimes.com reader asks in an e-mail this morning, when the New York Times acquired The Boston Globe or The Worcester Telegram & Gazette, did the Times discuss the prospects for "lower prices" for their readers and advertisers?

Zimmer's Firm: An item in the "metro business briefing" column in today's New York Times reports that Richard Zimmer is joining "the Washington law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher." It would be more accurate to say that Mr. Zimmer is joining the Washington office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a law firm based in Los Angeles.

The business section of today's New York Times carries a front-page article on Internet "me-zines" that dwells on the fact that Kausfiles.com has made a "profit." The article carries a graphic that runs with the line "How Mickey Kaus made more profit than The New Yorker magazine."

Now, Smartertimes.com is a big fan of Kausfiles.com, though it doesn't always agree with it. And there's clearly a certain tongue-in-cheek aspect to the Times article. But for the Times to pass along with even a hint of seriousness Mr. Kaus's claim -- "Pseudo.com, dead. Feed, on ice. Inside, sold. Salon, dying. Kausfiles, profitable" -- is just silly. For one thing, the "expenses" listed for Kausfiles.com don't include any salary or work space for him. If The New Yorker didn't pay its writers anything and didn't budget any money for their offices, it could be "profitable" too. The main expense of Kausfiles.com, by far, is the opportunity cost of Mr. Kaus's time. In the hours he spends working on the Web site, he could be doing something else that would earn him a salary. To declare his time worth nothing and then to consider the site "profitable" is a kind of legerdemain that is amusing in a one-liner from Mr. Kaus, but ridiculous when extended into a full-length trend story on the front of the Times business section.

The same Times article reports that the me-zines "Sometimes take pride in what they do not write." The article then quotes Joshua Micah Marshall of the j-marshall.com/talk site as saying, "For a number of reasons, I've tried to make these virtual pages a Condit/Chandra-free zone." This is a totally out-of-context quote, even though the Times mentions that Mr. Marshall wrote about missing intern Chandra Levy this weekend. Here's the full quote, from Mr. Marshall's Web site: "Of late, for a number of reasons, I've tried to make these virtual pages a Condit/Chandra free zone. But let me add one note regarding today's developments. " The "of late" makes it clear that Mr. Marshall had been following the Condit/Chandra developments quite closely -- in fact, as Kausfiles.com has noted, Mr. Marshall's site was "Chandra Central." It looks like the author of the Times article that is partly about Mr. Marshall's site hasn't actually been reading the site particularly closely.

Late Again: The arts section of today's New York Times carries a review of an Emmylou Harris concert that happened on the afternoon of July 4 at Battery Park. Today is July 9. The review is seven paragraphs long. There are a couple of possible explanations here. It's possible that the Times reviewer writes so slowly that he only turns out about two paragraphs a day, and the review was rushed into print as soon as it was finished. It's also possible that the review was written immediately after the concert and that there just wasn't room for it in the Times arts section until today. The space until today was all filled up with a review of a new pottery museum in Biloxi, Mississippi, and other articles that apparently took precedence over reviewing a concert that 15,000 New Yorkers attended.

Late Again: The national section of today's New York Times carries an article under the headline, "Some Lawmakers Urging U.S. to Speed Exports of Satellites." The article reports on legislation offered by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Rep. Howard Berman that would put decisions on technology transfer to China in the hands of the Commerce Department. Jim Mann of the Los Angeles Times had almost the exact same story on June 4, 2001. The New York Times waddles in more than a month later and, of course, fails either to mention the earlier L.A. Times account or to move the story significantly forward.