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July 10, 2022 at 6:30 am
A news article linked from the NYTimes.com home page carries the headline: "Some Surprising Good News: Bookstores Are Booming and Becoming More Diverse." The diversity the Times is talking about is racial diversity ("many of the new stores that opened during the pandemic are run by nonwhite booksellers"), not ideological or viewpoint diversity, which could partly explain why the Times drops the convention of journalistic neutrality and opens the headline with instructing readers that this is "Good News." On other topics the Times mostly at least attempts to pretend simply to deliver the news and defer to the readers to decide for themselves whether the news is good or bad. We don't see, for example, "Some Surprising Bad News: A Mass Shooting at a July 4 Parade."
U.S. Rule Risks Battery Supply Chain June 21, 2022 at 5:49 am
"U.S. Rule Risks Disrupting Global Battery Supply" is the front-page print headline over a Times news article. It's a strange headline, as what's really risking disruption to the global battery supply isn't the "U.S. Rule" but the Chinese genocide. The print headline treats Chinese behavior as immutable and U.S. policy as malleable. The online Times headline, "Red Flags for Forced Labor Found in China's Car Battery Supply Chain," is better. When there's that big a divergence between the print and online headlines, it's generally an indicator that one or the other is poorly crafted.
New York Congressional Primary June 19, 2022 at 9:18 am
Toward the end of a front-page Sunday Times news article about a Democratic congressional primary in New York City that has attracted 15 candidates, including Liz Holtzman, Mayor de Blasio, and Daniel Goldman, comes an extended discussion of how the timing of the election might affect the outcome:
April 24, 2022 at 9:20 am
From an article in a special Sunday design section, about a family that moved to Vermont from Los Angeles:
That's interesting that there was looting in Santa Monica, California in May 2020. The New York Times didn't pay much attention to it at the time, describing instead "peaceful protests" over the death of George Floyd. I searched the archives and did find a Times "California Today" newsletter dated June 1, 2020 that did say "Many of the demonstrations started peacefully and became violent, with widespread looting" and that "while many peacefully marched in Santa Monica and Long Beach, looters ransacked department stores and smashed windows." April 19, 2022 at 9:19 am
The New York Times business section features a news article headlined "How Russian Media Uses Fox News to Make Its Case." It reports, "Russian media has increasingly seized on Fox News's prime-time segments, its opinion pieces and even the network's active online comments section — all of which often find fault with the Biden administration — to paint a critical portrait of the United States and depict America's foreign policy as a threat to Russia's interests." The article features "four ways Russian media has used Fox News to bolster the government's narrative about the war," including "criticizing President Biden." February 25, 2022 at 7:48 am
A New York Times news article about a policy agenda drafted by moderate House Democrats includes this passage:
February 15, 2022 at 8:12 am
Instead of acknowledging a mistake and publishing a correction, the New York Times has stealth-edited the inaccurate phrase "Newton and Boston, about 10 miles apart" so that it now reads "Newton and Boston, with downtowns about 10 miles apart." That's still not accurate. There's no such thing or place as "downtown" Newton. Newton is a suburb made up of 13 villages, none of which is "downtown." Instead of defensively stealth-editing this a second time, the right move here for the Times would be to simply publish a correction acknowledging that the two cities are adjacent. The newspaper's failure to do this is a sign of a combination of arrogance and a newsroom culture that holds "corrections are bad and mean you did something wrong and will get in trouble, a kind of black mark on your record" rather than "mistakes sometimes happen, it's part of the process, and we'd much rather make it right than compound the error by legalistically or defensively refusing to admit the possibility that we are anything less than perfect." At least run the correction by someone who lives in Boston or Newton or who pointed out the original mistake to make sure that the change makes sense rather than introducing a second error. The Times hires so many people from the Boston Globe that talent retention is a serious business problem for the Globe, so you'd think that there'd be no shortage of people at the Times who might be able to help with this. February 11, 2022 at 8:13 am
A Times news article about school mask mandates reports, "Newton and Boston, about 10 miles apart, give an idea of how two politically liberal and cautious districts are approaching the choice — and how and why they may come to different decisions." It's not accurate that Newton and Boston are "about 10 miles apart." They actually directly border each other in at least two places—the Boston neighborhood of West Roxbury and the Newton neighborhood of Oak Hill, and the Boston neighborhoods of Brighton and Oak Square and the Newton village of Newton Corner. The Massachusetts Secretary of State has a map (pdf) of the cities and towns in the commonwealth that shows Newton and Boston are adjacent. If you are headed east on the Massachusetts Turnpike, you pass directly from Newton into Boston.
Darren Walker and a San Francisco Museum's New Director February 10, 2022 at 8:53 am
An arts section report on the naming of Christopher Bedford as director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art includes this passage:
What is Darren Walker doing in this article? He's not on the board of the San Francisco museum. The Ford Foundation isn't a major funder of the museum. Anytime a white male gets named to any job anywhere, the New York Times article about it is now going to include a quote from Darren Walker passing judgment on whether it's acceptable? February 4, 2022 at 6:10 am
Casual accusations of racism are not usually my thing. But to see, in the New York Times, which makes a big public show of being antiracist, a photo of three people with the two white people identified by name in a cutline and the black person not only not named but just totally ignored, treated as if he is invisible or nonexistent, is the sort of thing that I had hoped wouldn't happen anymore. It's disappointing. The photo runs with an obituary of basketball coach Bill Fitch. The print cutline says, "Bill Fitch, center, during practice with the Boston Celtics in May 1981. Kevin McHale was at right." The online cutline says, "Bill Fitch, center, during practice with the Boston Celtics in May 1981 as they prepared to meet the Houston Rockets for the N.B.A. championship series. Boston went on to beat Houston in six games. Kevin McHale was at right."
Times Refers to "Unborn" Children January 23, 2022 at 1:31 pm
From a New York Times magazine article headlined, "Trump's Dream of a Border Wall, Twisted Into a Sci-Fi Nightmare" (yes, more than a year into the Biden administration, the Times is still having, or stoking, Trump nightmares):
Weddings Editor Aims to "Normalize" Unwed January 12, 2022 at 6:25 am
The New York Times has published a question and answer style interview with Charanna Alexander, who in May 2021 was named "weddings editor" at the newspaper:
Whitewashing a Communist Camp
The New York Times has a strange, repeated "odd tendency to euphemize or dance around communism." The latest example comes in a super-long and pretty boring profile of a 97-year-old World War II veteran. The Times claims the person is known as "the king of the artificial Christmas Tree." The Times writes, "in midsummer of 1949, he went to Camp Unity, a leftist camp in Wingdale, N.Y." November 21, 2021 at 8:58 am
A column in the Sunday business section by Jeff Sommer, who "also edits business news" and previously was a national editor at the Times, reports:
November 16, 2021 at 8:13 am
The New York Times focuses on the surge in homicides, publishing a front-page news article that jumps to two full pages inside. The Times highlights what it calls "a surge in homicides that has swept across the country," reporting that "in many large cities — including Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia — the number of homicides this year is on track to surpass last year." The Times just can't figure out what might be behind this: "In dozens of interviews, criminologists, city and state officials and people close to murder victims could not name a single, direct cause of the spike in homicides, and said that it could take years of data collection before the phenomenon is fully understood." Still, it could be "the continued destabilizing effects of the coronavirus pandemic." Somewhat remarkably, the Times manages to cover this phenomenon without any mention of the Black Lives Matter protests against police. Some police and conservative politicians have linked the rise in crime to those protests.
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