A correction in this morning's New York Times reports: "An article yesterday about the indictments of 13 Saudis and a Lebanese man in a truck bombing at the Khobar Towers apartment building in Saudi Arabia in 1993 misidentified the country to which the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Louis J. Freeh, traveled during the investigation. It was Saudi Arabia, not Iran."

As the Times itself reports on its front page today, the Khobar Towers bombing took place in 1996. Not 1993. It takes a special skill to introduce a new factual error in the course of correcting an earlier factual error.

Wishful Thinking: An editorial in today's New York Times discusses a series of votes in the House of Representatives about environmental issues. The editorial declares that "In a series of votes on Thursday, an impressive bipartisan majority blocked administration plans for oil and gas exploration in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and in national monument lands, upheld important mining law reforms that Mr. Bush had opposed and restored millions of dollars for land protection and energy conservation programs that he had tried to cut."

"Impressive bipartisan majority?" Well, the Times editorialists must not be paying much attention to the reporting of their own newspaper's Washington bureau, which reports on the front page of today's Times, "The votes on Thursday showed that there was no solid environmental coalition."

The editorial declares that the House votes "send two unmistakable messages. The House is clearly eager to restore balance to Mr. Bush's energy strategy, which is weighted toward exploration for fossil fuels. It also wants Mr. Bush to know that his administration's dismissive approach to the nation's natural resources reflects a grievous misreading of the public temper."

Not so, according to the front-page news article in today's New York Times. The news article quotes Rep. Peter Hoekstra, who voted against drilling for oil off Florida, as saying, "This was not a bellwether vote. I wouldn't read all that much into it." The news article also reports that "Jeff Deist, a spokesman for Representative Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, said Mr. Paul voted against the offshore drilling bill as a protest of federal involvement in what he sees as local decisions." The messages these congressmen are sending, according to the Times news article, are different from the "unmistakable" message that the Times editorialists are hearing.

Note: Smartertimes.com is in Maine this weekend and is operating off the online edition of the New York Times.

Here is an item from the "World Briefing" column in today's New York Times: "Palestinians in the Gaza Strip lobbed a large-caliber mortar shell at a border crossing into Israel and fired antitank grenades at Israeli troops near the border with Egypt, lightly wounding a soldier, the army said." The Times item goes on to report that in the West Bank, "Palestinians reported that Jewish settlers burned cars, wheat fields and an olive grove in an area where a settler was shot dead on Wednesday." What's classic is the boldfaced headline that introduces the item: "Gaza Strip: Cease-Fire Holds." Mortars, anti-tank grenades -- by the definition of the Times, if these weapons are used by Palestinian Arabs, then the cease-fire is holding.

Household Name: An article in the national section of today's New York Times identifies Bill Clinton as "former president." It identifies Roger Clinton as "the president's half-brother." But Larry King, as in "Roger Clinton told Larry King last night," is just a household name, with no further description apparently thought necessary by the Times. Is Larry King really so famous that it's not worth spending the money on ink to include a two-word identification of him as "CNN host" or "television host"?

As part of its continuing campaign against repeal of the estate tax, the New York Times today devotes enormous, above-the-fold front-page play to an article that runs under the headline "States Expecting to Lose Billions From Repeal of U.S. Estate Tax." The article estimates the states' loss in tax revenue resulting from repeal of the estate tax at $50 billion to $100 billion over ten years. Those estimates seem in the ballpark when you consider that the article reports that states collected $7.5 billion in estate and inheritance tax revenue in 1999.

But wait a minute. Remember back to an earlier stage in the Times campaign against repeal of the estate tax: the stage during which the newspaper was trying to persuade readers that the repeal of the estate tax would have a devastating effect on the nation's charities. For instance, in a February 3, 2001, editorial titled "Estate Tax Folly," the Times warned that without the death tax, "bequests to universities and other charitable institutions could dry up." A February 10, 2001, Times news article reported, "The estate tax stimulates $14 billion a year in charitable bequests, according to an Internal Revenue Service study, money that nonprofit organizations have come to depend on." That same news article quoted Charles Collins, "director of the Responsible Wealth Project, a group of 450 business leaders and investors who favor the estate tax," who said, "Repeal would have a devastating impact on public charities ranging from higher education and health care to organizations assisting the poor and disadvantaged."

Now, think about this for a minute. According to the Times (and, supposedly, the IRS), the estate tax stimulates $14 billion a year in charitable bequests. That's money that goes to non-profit, tax-exempt organizations -- tax revenue lost to the government. If the Times is going to claim that this money only gets given because of the estate tax, then it seems only logical and consistent to assume that in the absence of the estate tax, these funds would remain in private hands -- and would be subject to taxation. If the money is spent rather than donated, the states will make money on sales taxes. If the money is invested, the states that tax dividend and interest income or capital gains will make money that way. But it's just alarmist and inconsistent to look at the effect on the states of estate tax repeal by simply zeroing out the estate tax revenue and not looking at any of the other, offsetting economic effects of the tax change. Especially when the Times had been making the argument so vigorously elsewhere about the effect of estate tax repeal on charitable donations.

Now, one could argue that the decline in charitable donations will create a need for additional state spending to provide the services that had been provided by charities. Or could argue that the effect of the estate tax repeal on charitable donations is being wildly overestimated. Or one could argue that the taxes on the $14 billion a year that will remain in private hands because of estate tax repeal still won't be enough to make up for the revenue the states will lose as a result of estate tax repeal. But failing even to mention the potential offset makes it look like the New York Times isn't interested in a genuine assessment of the costs and benefits of repealing the tax, but is rather interested in campaigning against the repeal.

More on Taxes: A New York Times/CBS News Poll reported in today's New York Times asked, "Was using a significant portion of the budget surplus to cut taxes the best thing to do, or would it have been better to spend the money on programs like Social Security and Medicare"? This question is utterly inconsistent with the Times's own logic, which insists that Social Security and Medicare are paid for by payroll taxes and lockboxes and trust funds and are not part of the general budget pool out of which the Bush income-tax cuts are a part. Medicare and Social Security are extremely popular programs. The Times could have asked, "Was using a significant portion of the budget surplus to cut taxes the best thing to do, or would it have been better to spend the money on public works projects in the districts of powerful members of the House Appropriations Committee?" Or it could have asked a general question about taxes versus spending, rather than specifying that the spending would be on two particularly popular and broad-based programs that, by the Times's accounting, aren't funded out of the main budget pool anyway. Now, you can make the Krugmanesque claim that the Bush tax cuts in the end will require raiding the Medicare "lock box," but even the most pessimistic budget analysts, even the Senate Democrats, acknowledge that most of the tax cuts are "funded" from surplus dollars that have nothing to do with Social Security or Medicare. Again, it looks like what's going on is that the Times isn't interested in genuinely measuring public opinion, but in campaigning against a tax cut.

This morning marks exactly one year since Smartertimes.com began publishing its daily critique of New York's dominant daily. And what a year it has been.

What began as an e-mail to 40 friends has now grown to reach a daily audience more than 100 times that size -- with no promotional spending or advertising expenditures by Smartertimes.com. Smartertimes.com has been named one of Brill's Content's "Sites We Like" ("encyclopedic griping . . .both irritating and addictive"); included in Forbes magazine's Best of the Web issue ("Reports have it that Stoll is getting under the skin of Times editors who are accustomed to basking in the paper's enormous prestige"); and cited in the columns of the New York Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal. The Economist wrote a profile that described the site as "a rival to the New York Times" and said, "Mr. Stoll seems to have struck a nerve." The New York Press named Smartertimes.com the "Best New Media Website" in its annual Best of Manhattan issue, writing, "We wish every New York Times reader would follow up their daily dose of the 'Truth' with a visit to smartertimes.com." Germany's Suddeutsche Zeitung ran a full-length feature ("Der Fehlerteufel"). Established Web sites like overlawyered.com, kausfiles.com, opinionjournal.com and Romenesko's medianews.org have added regular links to Smartertimes.com.

That is a mere sampling of the reaction. Just as typical is that from one Smartertimes.com reader who wrote: "Thanks for taking the Times to task for their daily nonsense. It's sad that I am forced to subscribe to this rag (weekends only) because my wife wants to read about the weddings of people she doesn't know, but what are you gonna do?"

Even the editors at the New York Times itself have taken notice, distributing excerpts from Smartertimes.com to the paper's editorial staff on an occasional basis as part of the newspaper's weekly internal self-critique.

And all this as the result of the efforts of, basically, a single semi-intelligent guy operating from his basement studio apartment in Brooklyn.

In the year ahead, Smartertimes.com will try to increase its readership and broaden its coverage. More about that in the coming weeks and months. For now, though, the editor would like to mark this birthday with warm thanks to all those who have contributed to the site's success by spreading the word, by contributing letters to the editor, or by just wiring a private note of encouragement. Each of you has helped in the effort to illuminate the errors of fact and logic in the dominant daily, and you have advanced the task of assembling a community of readers to support a new newspaper that would offer an alternative.

Little Support: The "Lessons" column on the education page of today's New York Times asserts that "using public money for private school has little public support." Well, maybe it has little support among the public that Times columnists encounter, but out in America, the idea has substantial support. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll conducted January 5 to 7 of this year, for instance, asked "Would vouchers improve the public school system?" Fifty-four percent of respondents said "yes," and 38 percent said "no." In that same poll, parents of school-aged children were asked, "If cost were not a factor, where would you prefer to send a child of yours -- to a public school or to a private or parochial school?" Fifty-four percent said private school and 46 percent public school. An ABC News/Washington Post poll of registered voters in October of 2000 found 40 percent in favor of "having the government give parents money to help pay for their children to attend a private or religious school," with 47 percent of parents of school-age children in favor. You can argue the wording of the questions or the sampling methods of the pollsters or the merits of the underlying issue, but it's just inaccurate to write that vouchers have "little public support."

Condit: A columnist on the New York Times op-ed page today writes about Rep. Gary Condit and missing intern Chandra Levy. "Even if he knows nothing about her disappearance, it's sad that Mr. Condit, who voted to impeach Bill Clinton, is now using Clintonian evasion," the column says. In fact, Mr. Condit, a Democrat, voted against every article of impeachment.

A headline in the business section of today's New York Times reports, "4 Media Companies Expect to Meet Estimates." The first sentence of the article says, "Large media companies announced yesterday that they expected to meet analysts' earnings estimates." And the four companies named in the article are Knight Ridder, Dow Jones, the Washington Post Co., and the New York Times Co. So an ordinary reader encountering the New York Times article and headline could well go away with the impression that the Washington Post Co. announced yesterday that it expected to meet analysts' estimates. In fact, however, as an article in the Wall Street Journal reports, "Washington Post, as is its custom, wouldn't talk about Wall Street's earnings forecasts." A look at the Washington Post corporate web site, which has the text and slides of the presentation made yesterday by the Washington Post's chief executive, Donald Graham, bears that out. The Times headline and article combine to leave readers with the wrong impression about what the Washington Post Company is telling Wall Street.

A front-page news article in today's New York Times describes a woman in California who was "scraping by on a $616-a-month welfare check." A photograph of her inside the newspaper pictures her in her kitchen, where a dishwasher and microwave oven are in clear view. Smartertimes.com mentions this not to be mean-spirited, but just to observe that "scraping by" in America today, and particularly by the definition of the New York Times, would be seen as doing pretty well by someone from a poor foreign country or by someone from America 100 years ago.

Patients' Bill of Wrongs: An editorial in today's New York Times discusses a proposed "Patients' Bill of Rights." The editorial says, "The White House, for its part, says the bill would open the floodgates to a wave of frivolous lawsuits, a claim not supported by the evidence in those states that have adopted similar legislation, including Texas under Governor Bush." This is misleading; the Texas patients' bill of rights included limits on civil damage awards that are not included in the federal legislation to which the White House is objecting.

The Times editorial goes on to complain that alternative federal legislation backed by the White House "seems more concerned with protecting the health care industry, a major Republican campaign contributor, than with protecting patients." The editorial somehow omits any mention of the fact that the legislation the Times supports would benefit trial lawyers, who are major Democratic campaign contributors -- and that the costs of the new litigation brought under the legislation would likely lead to increases in insurance premiums, meaning that more people go uninsured. The Times's own news coverage today reports on Congressional Budget Office estimates that say the legislation the Times prefers would increase insurance premiums by 4.2 percent, as against a 2.9 percent increase for the legislation the White House supports. The Times editorial makes no serious attempt to justify the additional costs, thundering on instead about the need for "meaningful reform."

Car Talk: An article in the business section of today's New York Times refers to "the aggressive and innovative Minnesota Public Radio, producer of 'A Prairie Home Companion' and 'Car Talk.'" In fact, "Car Talk" is a National Public Radio program that has nothing to do with Minnesota Public Radio.

Late Again: The front page of the business section of today's New York Times carries an article under the headline "Law Offices in California Make Cutbacks." That's old news to readers of the Wall Street Journal, which on Friday carried an article on the front page of its Marketplace section under the headline "Silicon Valley Law Firms Retrench as Deals, Stock Portfolios Dwindle."

An editorial in today's New York Times about roller coasters offers a perfect glimpse of the newspaper's reflexive attitude in favor of more government regulation. The editorial says that recent injuries and one death "suggest that the amusement park industry needs stricter oversight and that riders need stronger protections." The editorial concludes that "For the millions of Americans who enjoy amusement parks, roller coasters and other rides are statistically safer than riding in a car. But that does not mean that Congress should not move quickly to make these rides even safer." (Nothing like not avoiding the double negative for a stirring concluding sentence of an editorial.) The Times gives no estimate of what it would cost the taxpayers to set up a network of federal roller-coaster inspectors. And it doesn't consider whether that money could save more statistical life-years if, instead of being deployed on roller-coaster inspections, it were spent on, say, high blood-pressure screening, or seat-belt awareness campaigns, or cancer research. It's as if, to Times editorialists, spending priorities and cost-benefit analysis aren't worth considering. To them, the fact that someone has been injured is in and of itself sufficient justification to call for an expansion of the federal government's regulatory regime in an effort to prevent such injuries.

Talking Union: The lead article in the city section of this morning's New York Times is about an organizer for the Laborers' International Union of America. The article mentions that the local was tarnished by a scandal in the early 1990s, but it makes no reference at all to the more recent scandals at the national level of the union involving its president in the late 1990s, Arthur Coia, who pleaded guilty in 2000 to evading taxes on his $275, 000 1991 Ferrari , his $1,050,000 1972 Ferrari, and his $215,000 1973 Ferrari.

The article notes in passing that illegal immigrants are "about 60 percent" of the workers the union is trying to organize. Talk about burying the lead. More interesting than a profile of the union organizer might be a story that put the business owners on the spot about employing illegal immigrants.

A front-page article in today's New York Times runs under the headline, "Plain-Talking Bush Is Using His Charm on European Stage." The article reports that "In Brussels, at the NATO meeting that brought Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and other European leaders together, he had a retort for a photographer who was trying to get a shot of the American president and the French prime minister, Jacques Chirac, and complained to Lord Robertson, NATO's secretary general, 'Your backside is in the way.'"

The prime minister of France is Lionel Jospin; Mr. Chirac is the president of France.

Free Pass for Bloomberg: The New York Times has lavished front-page coverage on the mayoral candidacy of Michael Bloomberg, paying more attention to him than to the other mayoral candidates. And today, an article in the national section of today's New York Times gives Mr. Bloomberg a free pass. Under the headline "U.S. to Investigate Death in an Asthma Study," the Times writes about an investigation into the death of a "healthy volunteer in an asthma experiment at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore." In a full-length story on the death, the Times apparently finds it not worth mentioning the fact that Mr. Bloomberg, a New York mayoral candidate, is chairman of the Johns Hopkins board of trustees.

End the Silence: The lead editorial in today's New York Times, about economic growth in New York City, says, "It is time for the mayoral candidates to end their silence on economic issues." What silence? All the mayoral candidates except for Mr. Bloomberg appeared on Thursday at a conference sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. Fernando Ferrer called for a new tax dedicated to the construction of a Second Avenue subway; Alan Hevesi called for the city to open 200 storefront computer training centers; Peter Vallone came out against a living wage law, saying it "borders on socialism, which is something I'm not in favor of"; and Mark Green called for an "economic comstat," with which the city would woo private employers on a sector-by-sector basis rather than by simply granting tax breaks to individual firms that threaten to leave. Herman Badillo called for a phase-out of rent control. All of these are economic issues; the only reason that it seems as if the candidates have been silent on them is that the Times metropolitan coverage prefers to dwell instead on Mr. Vallone's hair, Mr. Bloomberg's personal wealth and the tactical maneuvering of the celebrity campaign consultants.

Plumping for Iran: In an op-ed piece in today's New York Times, Lee Hamilton and James Schlesinger call for America to appease the terrorist human-rights abusers who rule Iran. The Times describes Mr. Schlesinger as "energy secretary and defense secretary under Jimmy Carter." That was more than 20 years ago. There's no disclosure at all of Mr. Schlesinger's current affiliation with Lehman Brothers, an investment bank that does so much business in the energy sector that it advertises in Oil and Gas Investor. That puts the op-ed page article's claim that "American companies are missing opportunities to invest in Iran and develop its vast oil and gas resources" in a whole new light.

Slow on Chagall: The New York Times metro section today carries an article on a Chagall painting that is missing from the Jewish Museum. Le Monde carried a story about the missing painting on June 12; the New York Post had it on June 9; the Times waddles in today.

Once-Literate: An article in the Arts and Ideas section of today's New York Times reports on the woes of the publishing industry in the Arab world. But the headline and some other references in the article speak of the "Middle East." As in "Publishers in the once-literate Middle East are hindered by censorship, war, poverty, zealotry and the lure of TV." As in a photo cutline claiming that "throughout the Middle East, a region noted for its novelists, literature has lost its popularity." The article contains not a single mention of Israel, which is strange for an article that runs under a headline referring to the Middle East. Israel, after all, is in the Middle East.

A news article in the national section of today's New York Times reports on a dispute in the Senate over how much power the Democrats should have in blocking President Bush's judicial nominees. The Times reports that "If the Senate held a vote on the two issues, the Republicans would probably not prevail. But the vote would put the Democrats in the politically embarrassing position of opposing public disclosure and looking like they were ready to block President Bush's Supreme Court picks."

So it's now the position of the Times news department that it is "politically embarrassing" for the Democrats to appear ready to block President Bush's Supreme Court picks.

What's so embarrassing? Presumably, one reason that the voters who elected Democrats to the Senate put them there was so that they had a check on Mr. Bush's judicial nominees. One reason that the Constitution gives the Senate a role in confirming justices is to provide just such a check. If a Bush nominee were genuinely unfit for the court, presumably there would be some political benefit to the Democrats in saving the nation from such a nominee.

Anyway, if the Times news department thinks it is "politically embarrassing" to be prepared to block Mr. Bush's judicial nominees, then the Times newsroom ought to be embarrassed of the newspaper's own editorial page. In a May 11, 2001 editorial, "A Battle for the Courts," the Times wrote: "Democrats must not be timid in using the powerful leverage they have in a Senate and Judiciary Committee evenly divided between the two parties. If they stay united they can train the White House to send up mainstream conservative nominees or enter negotiations in which ideologically conservative nominees would have to be balanced by some liberal jurists chosen by the Democrats. A key is for the Democrats to stand firm on enforcing the prerogative under the so-called blue-slip policy that allows any senator to block a nominee from his home state."

The editorial continued: "no senator is obliged to regard the president as having an uninhibited right to reshape federal courts by imposing a political uniformity based on his own philosophy. It would plainly be best if bruising partisan battles over judges could be kept to a minimum. But what Mr. Bush calls civility is less important than preserving the impartiality and independence of the judiciary, and the Senate's proper role in the advise and consent process. " (The Constitution's word is "advice," but that's a small point.)

The Times editorial, that is, urged the Democrats to do exactly what the Times news article today terms "politically embarrassing."

Paid Agents: An editorial in today's New York Times argues against the plan by Senator Lieberman and Senator Helms to support freedom and democracy in Cuba. The editorial calls the plan "counterproductive" and says it "would be likely to do more harm than good." The editorial says, "It is unclear how Americans would overcome the obstacles that Cuban authorities would erect to impede or manipulate delivery of such assistance. Even if aid actually managed to reach legitimate democrats and independent groups, the assistance would mark them as paid agents of the United States." This, the Times claims, would "discredit" them.

These same arguments could have been used to argue against American aid to the Solidarity movement in Poland, which was successful and important in winning the Cold War. The truly telling sentence is the one that says American aid would "mark" the democrats as paid agents of the United States. The idea that there is some taint or "mark" attached to being an agent of the United States, or to accepting money from it, may hold sway in the editorial rooms of the New York Times. But among those fighting for liberty in unfree lands like Iraq and Cuba and Soviet-dominated Poland, association with the United States and its ideals of freedom and democracy is and was not a mark of shame but a badge of honor.

When is a riot merely a "disturbance"? When the victims are Jews and the paper is the New York Times. An article on the front of the metro section of today's New York Times reports that "Aside from crime, Mayor Dinkins had alienated many Jewish voters over the Crown Heights disturbances." "Disturbances" was the governmental euphemism that the Cuomo administration used in commissioning a report on the riot. But even that report said, "the rioting represented the most extensive racial unrest in New York City in over twenty years. It differed from most other disturbances throughout the turbulent 1960s... as the violence was directed at one segment of the population." The Cuomo-commissioned report called it rioting; the Giuliani administration has called it rioting; Yankel Rosenbaum was chased by a mob of 20 and murdered after one of them shouted "There's a Jew; get the Jew." The Times calls it a "disturbance."

In his 1999 memoir, the executive editor of the Times at the time of the Crown Heights riot, Max Frankel, confesses, "I did not give enough prominence, however, to the rioting in 1991, when bands of black youths, shouting, 'Kill the Jews!' ran wild in Crown Heights. They accosted Hasidim and policemen and fatally stabbed a rabbinical student from Australia who had the misfortune of crossing their path." Mr. Frankel referred to the Times's coverage of the riot as among the "major news failures of my editorship." Apparently, the Times has failed to take Mr. Frankel's critique to heart going forward, as it is still referring to the riots as mere "disturbances."

Can't Spell: A front-page article in this morning's New York Times reports on President Bush's nominee to be America's ambassador at the United Nations. The Times reports that "Former Secretary of State George P. Schulz is backing the appointment." If the paper is going to go to the trouble to include Mr. Shultz's middle initial, it could also go to the trouble to spell his last name correctly. It has no "c," but it does have a "t." This is at least the second time in less than a year that the Times has mangled Mr. Shultz's name; Smartertimes.com pointed out the mistake in its September 30, 2000, edition.

An editorial in today's New York Times expresses the newspaper's opposition to the death penalty. "We are also heartened by the declining level of support for capital punishment registered by opinion polls in recent years," the Times reports. Hmm. The editorial says the level of support is "declining," but it doesn't tell us exactly what the level of support is. Why could that be?

An article in the metro section of today's Times reports on a poll a year ago by Zogby International that found 75.4% of Muslim Americans think the death penalty is a fitting punishment for "heinous" crimes, compared with, the Times says, "75.2% for Catholic respondents, 81.2% for Protestants and 67.3% for the Jews." A Rasmussen Research poll of 1,000 randomly selected Americans on June 25, 2000, found "70% of Americans continue to believe in capital punishment, even if some individuals are occasionally executed by mistake. ThatÕs unchanged from the 68% who supported the death penalty in an earlier Portrait of America survey conducted in 1999. In fact, 53% believe the death penalty should be imposed more often than it is."

These Times editorials would have a better shot at being persuasive if they straightforwardly confronted the fact that they are arguing against a policy that 70% to 75% of the American public agrees with, rather than spinning such levels of support as "declining."

Getting Passive: The lead, front page news article in today's New York Times, datelined Jerusalem, reports, "A shooting death took place as Mr. Arafat was meeting with the C.I.A. director. A Greek Orthodox monk was killed while driving on a road connecting East Jerusalem to the large Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim. It was a drive-by shooting, initial reports said, and it was believed to be the first on that well-traveled stretch of road." The Times manages to write this without telling readers who did the shooting. If authorities hadn't yet determined that, then the Times could let its readers know that. As it is, the writing that took place was curiously lacking in information.

National Strategy: The "My Job" column of the Workplace section of this morning's New York Times is about an airplane mechanic. The Times could have easily written about a mechanic at Kennedy, La Guardia or even Newark airport. Instead, it finds one at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Just another sign of the Times's national and international ambitions and of the paper's neglect of its hometown readers.

The national section of today's New York Times carries an article under the headline, "Bush to Insist on Ethanol Use in California; Critics Say Cheaper Technology Can Avert Jump in Gasoline Prices." The article reports, "The decision opens up the biggest market in the country to corn producers and, in particular, could benefit the Archer Daniels Midland agribusiness, a major Republican contributor, because it is one of the few ethanol producers able to transport ethanol to the West and East coasts." The innuendo is that President Bush made this decision to reward a "major Republican contributor."

Well, it's true that Archer Daniels Midland, its political action committee and its executives are major Republican contributors. Yet somehow the fact that the company, its political action committee and its executives are also major Democratic contributors seems to the New York Times to be not worth mentioning. Since the Federal Election Commission's Web-searchable records begin in 1997, ADM donated $100,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, $200,000 to the Democratic National Committee, and $199,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. It addition, its political action committee donated $15,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and $10,000 to the Democratic Party of Illinois. The PAC also gave $3,000 to Evan Bayh, $2,000 to Barbara Boxer, $3,000 to Carol Moseley Braun, $3,000 to John Breaux, $10,000 to Mel Carnahan, $7,000 to Tom Daschle, $6,000 to Richard Durbin, $4,000 to Dianne Feinstein, $13,000 to Richard Gephardt, $10,000 to Ted Kennedy, $4,500 to Charles Rangel, $10,000 to Charles Stenholm, and $10,000 to Robert Torricelli -- all Democrats.

For the Times to describe ADM as "a major Republican contributor" tells only half the story.

Cuban Propaganda: The metro section of today's New York Times carries a propaganda dispatch from Havana that is worthy of Herbert Matthews, the Times correspondent who was a dupe of Castro 40 years ago. Today's dispatch reports on eight poor medical students from the U.S. who are studying in Cuba on scholarships provided by the Communist regime there. "Conservative critics, however, says the students are being used as mere propaganda tools," the Times reports in a pathetic attempt to demonstrate some objectivity. But the article doesn't quote a single such conservative critic. And in any case, the critics of Cuba aren't just conservatives but have included over the years liberal anti-Communists like John F. Kennedy and Lane Kirkland. The Miami Herald, which reported on this program months ago, had a much more balanced article that included quotes from actual critics of the program and of the Castro regime. The Times account, on the other hand, reports unquestioningly that "Cuba's own medical system -- though beleaguered by shortages -- has been praised by some experts as a model for community and preventative medicine, especially in the third world." The article further quotes the students referring to "the successes Cuba has had in public health, which have eluded its Caribbean and Latin American neighbors." The Cuban public health "successes" are like the Soviet Union's agricultural "successes" -- the imaginary creations of Communist bureaucrats whose career advancement depends on creating statistics to demonstrate "successes" even when the reality is that of miserable failure.

The metro section of today's New York Times carries an article under the headline, "Schumer Proposals Address Shortage of Office Space."

The article reports on the findings of a Schumer-convened panel known as the Group of 35. The Times says the group "calls for a combination of condemnation, tax breaks, transit links and zoning changes to create expanded business districts in Downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City in Queens, and on the far West Side of Manhattan." The Times reports that Mr. Schumer "said it would cost about $500 million over 20 years to piece together development sites at the core of the three proposed districts." That doesn't include the cost of the tax breaks for the tenants and developers, nor transportation projects endorsed by the report that cost at least $1.3 billion.

The Times article doesn't raise a single question about why Mr. Schumer, who has been voting in Congress against across-the-board income tax cuts, thinks there should be tax breaks targeted at New York real estate developers. Nor does the Times quote anyone who questions the central-planning mentality of the Schumer approach: the senator is quoted as saying, "We're trying to lay out a blueprint for where new businesses can grow in New York City and where existing businesses can expand." Why doesn't Mr. Schumer just get out of the way and get the government out of the way by reducing taxes and regulations citywide rather than in a few Schumer-selected areas? Then, the businesses could decide for themselves where to expand rather than having to follow Mr. Schumer's "blueprint."

Most egregiously, the New York Times article omits any reference to the fact that the report of the Group of 35 was delivered a year behind schedule. Senator Schumer stood up at a breakfast of New York business leaders in January of 2000 and warned that a "troubling storm cloud" was looming on the horizon that "could cause New York City to stagnate or even decline." New York, the senator said, "is about to enter into a space crisis. Firms do not have enough room to grow." At that point, in January of 2000, the senator announced that he was convening a "Group of 35" leaders from business, government and labor to "conduct an in-depth study of the city's space problem and issue a report within six months."

By September of 2000, Mr. Schumer was promising the report "by the end of the year."

In February of 2001, the senator was promising the report "in about a month."

In fact, the Times article says, the report is to be released today. In the meantime, of course, New York's commercial real estate market has softened considerably. It has become clear that the main challenge facing the new economy companies Mr. Schumer was so worried about in January 2000 was not a lack of space but a lack of profits. Which makes all the more ridiculous and telling Mr. Schumer's comment, back in January of 2000, that, "If it were left to the market alone, the type of space we need would eventually develop, but long after many of our growing businesses left and our more established but growing businesses chose to expand elsewhere."

Conservative Plot: An article in the business section of today's New York Times reports on the cessation of publication by two Web sites, Feed and Suck. The Times reports that "perhaps a Plastic contributor offered the best explanation for the publications' dire straits: 'This has got to be some type of conservative plot out to restrict free-thinking attitudes,' Star Temp wrote in the site's chat area. 'I'm quite sure of it.'" Only the Times would consider comments in a chat area about a "conservative plot" to be the "best explanation" for a development in the Internet publishing business.

Contrast: A front-page article in today's New York Times reports on President Bush's relations with Europe. "For one thing, in contrast to Mr. Bush's conservative agenda, Europe is dominated by left-of-center governments that hold fast to the notion that a compassionate state is needed to make sure that inequalities produced by a free-market system do not get out of hand." The "contrast" there is imagined. Mr. Bush, the evidence suggests, himself holds fast to the notion that a compassionate state is needed to make sure that inequalities produced by a free-market system do not get out of hand. (Though he might quibble by asserting that a free-market system produces fewer inequalities than any of the other systems that have been tried, and that that such inequalities that do exist aren't all produced by the free-market system.)

The same Times article goes on to report that Europeans "were horrified and caught completely unaware when Mr. Bush announced that he was tossing out the Kyoto protocol, which would have committed industrial nations to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases." As Smartertimes.com pointed out on June 1, 2001, the Kyoto Protocol was trashed as far as the U.S. was concerned long before Mr. Bush got to the White House. On July 25, 1997, the U.S. Senate voted 95-0 in favor of the Byrd-Hagel resolution instructing U.S. negotiators that any greenhouse gas reduction agreement must apply to developing countries as well as to industrialized nations such as America. The actual Kyoto agreement violated these instructions. On January 30, 1998, the executive committee of the AFL-CIO passed a resolution calling on President Clinton "to refrain from signing the proposed Kyoto Protocol to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change." On July 18, 2000, the Senate passed, 97-2, an Interior Appropriations bill that included a ban on the use of any of the money to implement the Kyoto Protocol. The Clinton-Gore administration never even submitted the Kyoto Protocol for ratification by the Senate, even while it went through the motions of continuing the Kyoto "process" and trying to modify the treaty. If the Europeans were horrified and caught completely unaware, it was their own fault for not paying attention to what was going on.

Dominant Movement: A dispatch from Jerusalem in the international section of today's New York Times refers to "the American Reform Jewish movement, which is the dominant Jewish movement in the United States." While by some definitions the Reform movement may have more self-identified members than Conservative Judaism, the Conservatives are close enough that Reform can't be accurately described as "dominant." Many would argue that the energy and commitment among adherents to Orthodox Judaism mean that Orthodoxy is the dominant movement despite its smaller numbers. Rather than saying how dominant or submissive Reform Judaism is, the Times might just say how many members the movement claims and how many Jews there are in America.

A profile of Senator Lieberman in today's New York Times magazine reports that Mr. Lieberman is "dedicated to achieving fairness through growth rather than redistribution." The next sentence says, "Lieberman would have happily voted for a $900 billion tax cut tilted toward the middle class rather than the rich." Hello? A tax cut "tilted toward the middle class rather than the rich" IS redistribution. The way the tax code is currently configured, the rich already pay a higher income tax rate than the middle class. Giving the middle class a larger tax break without cutting taxes on the rich would increase the progressivity of the tax code, redistributing money from the rich taxpayers to the middle class. One can be for such redistribution or against it, but there's no getting around the fact that it's redistribution.

Asian Admissions: The "Sunday Q and A" column in the national section of today's New York Times has the question: "Does being Asian-American help or hurt your chances of getting into a selective college?" The Times answer, in a nutshell, is "Elite colleges also place a premium on diversity. And because Asian-American applicants represent a clear minority at nearly all of the nation's most selective colleges, a student who can check the box next to Asian-American on an application is likely to get a boost as a result." The answer then devotes three paragraphs to the situation at Bates College, which, the Times says, accepted 49 percent of the 113 Asian-American students who applied for the freshman class. That compares with an acceptance rate of 38 percent for the 3,021 white Americans who applied, the Times reports.

A straight comparison like that is useless without knowing the grades and standardized test scores of the white and Asian-American applicants. If all the Asian-American applicants to Bates got straight A's and perfect SAT scores, and all the whites got C's and mediocre SAT scores, then the statistics the Times cites demonstrate not a "boost" for Asian-American applicants, but a penalty. In 1990 the Harvard Crimson obtained detailed admissions data for Harvard College after a Freedom Information Act request filed with the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education, which had been investigating Harvard's admissions practices. The Crimson analysis found that while Harvard claimed to applicants that there was a "tip" or preference given to Asian-American applicants, in fact, the tip was nonexistent. The Times claim that being a minority at a college results in a boost is similarly absurd; the minorities that the colleges are particularly eager to admit are the ones that are underrepresented at colleges compared to their presence in the general population. And while Bates may have fewer than its share of Asian-Americans, selective colleges such as MIT, Cal Tech, Harvard, Stanford and Yale now have so many Asian-Americans that the "boost" the Times claims exists is all but nonexistent. If anything, Asian-Americans need higher grades and test scores to get into those institutions and overcome the preferences granted to athletes, legacies and "underrepresented" minorities.

Speaking of Harvard: An article in the metro section of today's New York Times claims that "During the McCarthy era, for instance, campuses like Harvard and City College dismissed professors who would not answer questions from government investigators about whether they or their colleagues were Communists." That's an unsupported smear of Harvard. In one famous case, as the Harvard Crimson reported on December 1, 2000, "When Associate Professor of Physics Wendell H. Furry took the Fifth before a Congressional committee in a nationally publicized case, Harvard reprimanded him but said that his refusal to speak was not cause for dismissal." In another famous case, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, Helen Deane Markham, was suspended for a month and a half when the university decided it could "no longer reasonably believe that she is free from Communist domination," the Crimson reports. And the left-wing activist ex-wife, Ann Ginger, of a deceased assistant professor at Harvard Business School, Raymond Ginger, claims that Harvard forced her husband to resign when he refused to answer questions from Harvard about whether he and his wife were Communists. But in no known case has it been shown that a Harvard professor was dismissed for refusing to answer questions from the government about Communist infiltration. There were enough genuine sins during the McCarthy era that it isn't necessary for the New York Times to manufacture any more of them.

The same metro section article refers to "a 26-day protest at Harvard during which students occupied the administration building." There are several administration buildings at Harvard; "an" would have been a better choice of articles in that sentence.

Can't Spell: What is it about Rashid Khalidi that the New York Times can't seem to spell his name correctly? An article in the Week in Review section of today's Times gets the name right on first reference, then spells it "Khaladi." The Times also spelled his name wrong on December 29, 2000, as Smartertimes.com pointed out at the time.

A front-page article in today's New York Times reports that the Real Estate Board has held a series of receptions for New York mayoral candidates at "the 101 Club, a private restaurant in the skyscraper at 101 Park Avenue at 34th Street. The office tower is owned by Peter Kalikow, a developer who has been active in the board's electoral effort and who was recently appointed by Gov. George E. Pataki, a Republican, to head the Metropolitan Transportation Authority."

Norman Thomas High School is the closest thing to a skyscraper at Park Avenue and 34th Street. The Kalikow-owned skyscraper at 101 Park Avenue, which houses the 101 Club, is at Park Avenue and East 40th Street. File this one in the Smartertimes.com archives under, "New York, lack of basic familiarity with."

Undeveloped in Manhattan: The lead paragraph of an article in the metro section of today's New York Times reports on the selection of architects for "what is described as the largest undeveloped site in Manhattan, a nine-acre riverfront stretch south of the United Nations complex." Note the passive construction: "what is described as." The Times never says who described it that way. Whoever it is, that person is wrong, or at least using an odd definition of "undeveloped." For one thing, the site isn't exactly virgin forest; there's a big Con Edison plant there. By that definition, there are probably large swaths of Manhattan above 96th St. that could be considered undeveloped. And Central Park might also be considered undeveloped. If the Times wants to convey to its readers the size of this development, it could be more responsible, like the New York Observer was in its article on the site. The Observer article, which appeared Wednesday, called the land "one of the city's choicest development sites" and said that it could have room for "a giant, 6,300-unit apartment complex" or roughly five skyscrapers' worth of office space. The Observer didn't resort to parroting unattributed superlatives that are both vague and specific at the same time.