The New York Times reports this morning on a new New York Times/CBS News poll. The poll found that 67% of registered voters say George W. Bush "has strong qualities of leadership," while 61% think Al Gore does. The same poll found that 53% said Mr. Bush "would make U.S. defenses stronger," while only 18% said Mr. Gore would. The same poll found that 43% said Mr. Bush "is likely to reduce taxes," while 27% said Mr. Gore would.

So what headline do you think the New York Times runs over this story on an inside news page? Here it is: "Voters Rate Gore as the Candidate Best Prepared to Lead."

The only data in the study that could possibly justify that inside headline are highlighted on page one of the Times, while the numbers about leadership qualities, taxes, and defense are buried inside the paper. A front-page subheadline crows "Gore Seen as More Ready." As the news story itself notes, "The lingering questions about Mr. Bush's preparedness do not seem to have affected his overall standing as reflected in the poll." So why make a big deal of it in the headlines?

Pax Christi: A dispatch in the national section of the Times today from St. Cloud, Minnesota, reports on the efforts of a variety of religious leaders to get the federal government to spend less money on weapons and more on welfare and schools. The story takes the "venerable peace organization" entirely at face value, and quotes one religious nuclear-freeze activist as saying that his group is "not coming from a romantic or naive view of the dangers in this world." Not much it isn't. Would it be too much to ask in a story like this for at least a note of skepticism, or the inclusion of a comment from someone -- even a Democrat like President Clinton -- who thinks that abolishing the death penalty, lifting sanctions on Iraq, and immediately banning all nuclear weapons would be a bad idea?

Energy Rule: Also in the national section of today's New York Times, a story about new federal energy efficiency standards for appliances offers a window into the arcane world of federal government regulations. The story recounts this drama in all apparent seriousness: "The energy-saving strategy also includes a proposal to make clothes washers 35 percent more efficient in the use of water and power, which will be announced this week; a new standard making water heaters 5 percent to 9 percent more efficient, proposed in April; and a new rule on fluorescent lamps, published in final form on Sept. 19. Coincidentally, a new rule requiring that room air-conditioners be 10 percent more efficient took effect on Sunday. A rule that will make refrigerators 30 percent more efficient takes effect on July 1." The article includes quotes from an air-conditioning trade-group spokesman and from a conservation advocate. But what the story could have really used was a quote from some regulatory reform advocate saying something to the effect of, "Think of all the energy being wasted by bureaucrats trying to order Americans what kind of light bulbs and clothes-washers to buy, and all the energy being wasted by corporations hiring lawyers and lobbyists to track these rules, shape them, and eventually comply with them. Wouldn't it make more sense to just let corporations manufacture appliances with a wide range of prices and energy efficiencies, and to allow consumers to decide for themselves whether they want to spend more at the outset for appliances that will save them energy costs over the long run?"

A top-of-the-front-page news article in today's New York Times about the violence in Israel contains the following assessment of the causes of the clashes, blaming the Israeli politician Ariel Sharon: "It is widely believed here that the present violence was touched off by Mr. Sharon's visit on Thursday. The Israelis have not formally acknowledged that. Today, though, a senior Israeli official said, 'It's clear to everyone that it's the Sharon show that created the original damage.'" Yesterday's Times news story was even more blatant in blaming Mr. Sharon, writing of "the third day of fierce fighting set off by the defiant visit on Thursday of a right-wing Israeli leader, Ariel Sharon, to the steps of the ancient mosques atop Jerusalem's Old City."

Bizarrely, however, today's New York Times story fails to report on the comments of Israel's prime minister about the causes of the violence. The prime minister, Ehud Barak, has offered unprecedented concessions to the Palestinian Arabs, and if anyone could be expected to blame the violence on Mr. Sharon, who is Mr. Barak's political opponent, it would be Mr. Barak. Yet here is a report from this morning's New York Post: "When Barak was asked by Israeli state radio whether the visit last Thursday by opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount had sparked the riots, Barak answered clearly, 'No. It has nothing to do with it.' His spokesman, Gadi Baltyansky, when asked the same question by a BBC reporter, answered, 'Every Jew has the right to visit the holiest place for the Jews.'"

It's just unfair of the Times to assert in its own words that three days of fighting "were set off by the defiant visit" of Mr. Sharon, and that that view is "widely believed here," and to quote an unnamed Israeli source saying that "It's clear to everyone" -- and then to omit the on-the-record public statements by Mr. Barak and his spokesman exonerating Mr. Sharon. It's not just that the Israelis "have not formally acknowledged" that the violence is Mr. Sharon's fault; their elected leader has flat-out denied it.

For the third day running, the Times coverage erroneously refers to the Dome of the Rock as a mosque. One story inside the paper referred to "the fabled Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem,"; another refers to Mr. Sharon's "tour of the ancient mosques atop the Old City," referring to more than one mosque. A mosque is a place where Muslims gather for public prayer. The Dome of the Rock is not a mosque. There are not regularly held prayers there. For one thing, there isn't much room there for the crowds and prostrating that are a feature of Muslim worship; there's just a narrow passageway surrounding the rock itself. For another thing, the perfectly nice Al Aksa mosque is right nearby. Christian visitors to the Holy Land who were unaware of these distinctions mistakenly called the Dome of the Rock the "Mosque of Omar," but that term has fallen out of use because of its inaccuracy. Anyone with any knowledge of Islam could tell the Times that the Dome of the Rock is not a mosque.

Joe Lieberman, Smoker: The New York Times misses a wonderful opportunity today to tweak Joseph Lieberman. A news story today about Mr. Lieberman's editorials in the Yale Daily News reports in its lead paragraph that Mr. Lieberman "called for a national no-smoking campaign -- in 1964." Lower down, the story quotes the editorial as saying "It is imperative that a major public and private campaign to discourage cigarette smoking should begin." Yet a close examination of the photograph accompanying the story shows the young Mr. Lieberman holding to his mouth an instrument that looks an awful lot like a tobacco pipe. The article makes no attempt to reconcile Mr. Lieberman's anti-tobacco editorial stance with his own apparent habits.

Suppose you are a left-wing activist with an agenda of expanding the size of government and its regulation of the economy. You want national health insurance, government-subsidized housing, government-subsidized child care, government-subsidized transportation and a hefty increase in the minimum wage. Since these policies, and the taxes and bureaucracy necessary to implement them, stand little chance of succeeding on their own merits in the American political arena, what should you do? Well, to judge by a story the New York Times runs today on its front page, the answer is simple: find some economists to cook up a study making things look worse then they really are, then give an early copy of the report to the New York Times, which, while going through the motions of quoting a few economists who disagree with the report, will for the most part advance the liberal activist agenda by giving the cornball study big play in its Sunday paper.

Today's story is almost humorous in its attempt to find bad news about New York's booming economy. It begins, "New York City's rebounding economy has produced a record number of jobs, but a new study shows that the number of low-wage jobs, those paying less than $25,000 a year, is growing much faster than the number of middle- or high-wage jobs." Note the use of the conjunction "but," which is the Times's way of suggesting that these two trends are somehow inconsistent or contradictory. The Times, and the study's authors, apparently see this rapid creation of jobs at the entry level of the labor market as bad news. The study is quoted as saying that, "Despite the strong pace of private-sector job growth, an alarming number of families in New York City are unable to earn enough to achieve an acceptable standard of living."

But to realize how silly this is, just imagine that the study had found the opposite situation: that middle- and high-wage jobs were growing much faster than low-wage jobs. How much do you want to bet that the Times would have put the exact same bad-news lead on the story, and that the study's authors would have used it to justify the exact same big-government policy recommendations? In that case, the story might have begun something like this: "New York City's booming economy has produced a record number of jobs, but a new study shows that the number of low-wage jobs, those paying less than $25,000 a year, is growing much more slowly than the number of middle- or high-wage jobs." In the actual story from today, the Times identifies the actual trend as bad news for poor persons because they have to work in low-wage jobs; in our hypothetical counterexample, the Times would identify the hypothetical opposite trend as bad news for poor people because their employment opportunities were not growing as fast as those for the rich. It's enough to remind a reader of that Cold War-era joke about the headline the Times would have run on its front page in the event of a nuclear annihilation: "World Ends in Nuclear Attack; Poor Hardest Hit."

Today's Times story, and the study upon which it is based, buys into all the usual left-liberal confusions that come up when discussing income statistics. For instance, the article reports, "The new study on low-wage workers found a widening gap between rich and poor workers. From 1989 to 1999, average wages for workers in New York earning more than $75,000 annually jumped by 65 percent, after inflation is taken into account, while those earning under $25,000 experienced a 2.2 percent drop. For those in the least-skilled occupations, after-inflation wages fell by 14 percent." But the study is almost certainly based on snapshot averages and medians, not longitudinal studies of the same individuals over time. In other words, the workers in 1989 who were making less than $25,000 may have been newly arrived immigrants driving taxis while they were studying for the bar exam, or college students working as lifeguards on the beach during the summer. Now, ten years later, they may be highly paid lawyers and investment bankers. In other words, these studies about the gap between rich and poor understate the effect of income mobility. In New York, as in the rest of America, "the rich" and "the poor" are essentially the same folks; the rich have simply been in the labor market ten or 20 years longer than the poor, or they have families who have been in America for one or two generations longer.

The political agenda driving the study and the news report is made clear in a quote from the study's chief author: "This city is always going to have a significant low-wage service sector. The question is: Is public policy going to provide these people with a way to make ends meet?" The whole political discussion is wrapped up in the word "provide." We've had this welfare reform debate already, and we're under the impression that there's a pretty broad consensus in America that "a way to make ends meet" is something that individual breadwinners in America have to figure out how to earn for themselves, not something that is provided by the government. The Times article today discusses the cases of three individual low-wage workers, and it's hard not to be sympathetic to them (though, in discussing their wages, the Times ignores the effect of the earned income tax credit). Yet it would be just as easy to go to France or Germany or some other country with a high effective minimum wage, government health insurance, generous welfare benefits and a high tax burden to pay for them, and to find three unemployed individuals who are loafing on street corners, jobless, because those public policies discourage private-sector job creation. If the approaches outlined in the study and the Times article are so desirable, why aren't more of these low-wage American workers migrating to European countries where such policies are already in place?

Getting Worse on Sharon: Yesterday's edition of Smartertimes.com noted that an editorial in Saturday's Times about the fighting in Jerusalem was in error in referring to the Dome of the Rock as a mosque. A front-page news story in today's Times repeats the error, referring to "the seventh-century mosque the Dome of the Rock." Check any decent reference book or academic expert on Islam; It's not a mosque. But the news story today goes even further in distorting what is going on in Israel. The first paragraph of the article refers, in the Times's own words, to "the third day of fierce fighting set off by the defiant visit on Thursday of a right-wing Israeli leader, Ariel Sharon, to the steps of the ancient mosques atop Jerusalem's Old City." Never mind the incorrect plural "mosques" -- have we mentioned that the Dome of the Rock is not a mosque? What this sentence does is blame the fighting on Mr. Sharon, when all Mr. Sharon did was to go up peacefully to the plaza atop the Temple Mount and walk around with a tour guide. It was the sermon at Al Aksa mosque on Friday that whipped the Arabs into a stone-throwing frenzy. As the Times article itself acknowledges lower down, "Mr. Sharon denied that it was his visit that had touched off violence. 'It was not my visit that lit the fire, but Palestinian incitement,' he said."

More evidence in this story that the Times is siding with the Arab stone-throwers against the Israeli Jews comes with the use of the phrase "Arab East Jerusalem." Arab East Jerusalem existed from 1948 to 1967, but since 1967, the city has been united under Israeli sovereignty. There is no such thing as "Arab East Jerusalem" or, for that matter, as "Jewish West Jerusalem." If the Times wanted to be fair it might refer to "predominantly Arab sections of eastern and northern Jerusalem" or to "predominantly Jewish sections of western and southern Jerusalem." But to refer in the year 2000 to Arab East Jerusalem is to to implement by edict of the Times something that Israeli voters have yet to agree to: a division of the Israeli capital.

The most egregious error in the Times's front-page story today on the violence in Israel, however, comes in the reference to the outbreak as "the worst sustained violence the area has seen since riots erupted in 1996 after Israel opened an ancient tunnel deep beneath the plaza." This is just an error of geographic fact. The tunnel doesn't run "deep beneath the plaza," but along the edge of it. The Times editors could look at a map or go there and see for themselves. The claim that the tunnel ran underneath the Temple plaza and would therefore somehow undermine the Al Aksa mosque was a myth that the Arabs used in 1996 to incite violence against Israelis. Other newspapers that initially committed that error have since acknowledged it was an error; The San Francisco Chronicle, for instance, ran a correction on this point that appeared on September 28, 1996.

In a front-page news story and a lead editorial, the New York Times today blames an Israeli politician and former general, Ariel Sharon, for the fact that Muslims emerging from Friday prayers at Al Aksa mosque in Jerusalem rained stones on Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall. In the Times's view, as in Yasser Arafat's, Mr. Sharon's visit was inappropriately "provocative." So, the Times editorial writes, "Ariel Sharon, the Likud leader, did Israel no favor by provocatively leading his supporters to the Temple Mount on Thursday, asserting Jewish claims to the Muslim holy site at a moment when authority over the area is the most sensitive remaining issue in the peace talks." It's hard to see how a visit by a Jewish Israeli politician to a Jewish holy site that is under Israeli political sovereignty can fairly be criticized as "provocative." Imagine the Times writing an editorial saying, "Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader, did African Americans no favor by provocatively leading his supporters to Selma, Alabama on Thursday, asserting black claims to integration at a moment when racial segregation is a sensitive and disputed issue." Or, to give a more recent example, "Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student, did gays no favor by provocatively visiting a predominantly heterosexual bar on Thursday at a time when gay rights are still a sensitive issue." The editorial calls on Yasser Arafat to accept international control over the Temple Mount -- presumably control by the same United Nations that for years condemned Zionism as racism and that to this day routinely issues harsh and unjustified criticism of Israel while turning a blind eye to Arab human rights violations. But the Times editorial doesn't condemn the Arabs for throwing stones at the innocent Jewish worshipers, and it doesn't criticize the mufti or imam whose sermon reportedly whipped the crowd at the Friday services into the stone-throwing frenzy. No, the only person blamed for the violence was Mr. Sharon. All he did was walk around with a tour guide on the Temple Mount plaza. He was quoted afterward saying "Arabs have the right to visit everywhere in the Land of Israel, and Jews have the right to visit every place in the Land of Israel." It's a liberal, inclusive view, in contrast to that of the Israeli left, which speaks of the need for separation from the Palestinian Arabs and wants to partition the Arabs into a state of their own on the West Bank. To consider Mr. Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount an inappropriate provocation, as the Times apparently does, one would have to be either ignorant or biased. We'll give the Times the benefit of the doubt and say they are ignorant. The editorial, after all, also claims that "The Temple Mount contains two of Islam's holiest mosques, the Dome of the Rock and al-Aksa." And anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Islam would know that the Dome of the Rock is not a mosque.

Sloppy Spelling: In the international section of today's New York Times, an article about security efforts at the State Department refers to President Reagan's secretary of state as "George P. Schultz." A second reference is to "Mr. Schultz." In fact, the correct spelling of the man's name is "Shultz." There should be no "c."

A story in the national section of today's Times about the presidential race in the state of Michigan reports that a Times/CBS poll "shows two-to-one backing" for school vouchers in the state, where there is a proposition about school vouchers on the ballot in November. The story describes George W. Bush as "an eager advocate of vouchers."

Hold on a minute. The Times devoted an entire story just yesterday to reporting that "On Tuesday afternoon, when asked if he supported vouchers, Mr. Bush sidestepped the issue by saying the decision should be left to state and local officials. And on Tuesday evening, when Larry King asked him on his CNN program whether he thought vouchers worked, Mr. Bush replied, 'I'm not positive.'" The story from yesterday also reported that "many polls suggest that the public is divided on the matter. A New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in July showed that 47 percent of voters supported the concept of taxpayer-financed vouchers, while 46 percent opposed it."

After writing that story in Thursday's paper, it's just strange for the Times, without any explanation of its shift, to come in on Friday with another story giving a sharply varying assessment of both popular opinion and Mr. Bush's posture on the issue.

Cheaper Drugs: The Times has been excoriating George W. Bush in its editorial columns for backing a tax cut that the Times claims helps the rich at the expense of the poor. Yet when it comes to drug pricing, the Times seems to think that it is a problem that the rich (Americans) are subsidizing the poor (Africans, Mexicans). An editorial in today's Times on a proposal to allow the import to America of lower-priced drugs from abroad says "the proposal is worth trying for the simple reason that American patients now bear the brunt of development costs for drugs that are used worldwide. Protected by patent laws and the prohibition against drug imports, American manufacturers charge high prices in the domestic market. The profits cover the cost of finding the next blockbuster drug. Having recovered development costs in the domestic market, manufacturers can sell abroad at low, government-set prices and still add to their profits. The proposed legislation would attempt to tilt the market in favor of American consumers." In other words, the proposed legislation would attempt to tilt the market in favor of the rich. It's strange that the Times would be against having the rich subsidize the poor when it comes to the medicine industry, but in favor of it when it comes to the structure of the tax code. One could almost imagine they have it in for the pharmaceutical industry.

Liberal Brookings: A story in the national section of today's Times about the energy policies of the presidential candidates refers to "the Brookings Institute, a liberal-leaning research organization." This is huge progress; traditionally the Times has labeled the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks as "conservative" while letting the left-wing tanks go unlabeled. Hold the congratulations, though. Another story in the national section, about a speech given by Al Gore at Brookings, referred to "the Brookings Institution, one of Washington's most prominent research organizations. It is a nonpartisan group that conducts research on a broad range of domestic and foreign policy topics." Aha. The unintended disclosure here is that the Times considers "liberal-leaning" and "prominent. . . nonpartisan" to be synonyms.

Minstrel Show: When General Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and J.C. Watts spoke at the Republican National Convention in Philadephia, the Times denounced them as "props" and described the event, in an editorial observer column, as a "minstrel show." At the time, Smartertimes.com expressed a certain skepticism about the Times's ability to accept with respect the political beliefs of black Republicans. It appears we spoke too soon. A front-page story in today's Times suggests that what the Times was objecting to was not the political views of the convention speakers but merely the appearance of any persons of color in the presidential campaign. The story refers to Al Gore's use of "audience members as props" and notes that "Mr. Gore's guests are demographically diverse," including a black and a Hispanic. We are still waiting for the editorialists to denounce Mr. Gore for his minstrel show, but we are pleased to note that the Times is bipartisan when it comes to describing minorities on the campaign trail as "props."

AOL's Wages: In a gushy article praising an offshore AOL help center that uses Filipino workers to respond to questions from American computer users, Times columnist Thomas Friedman reports that jobs at the center "pay about triple the local minimum wage, and come with a 10-kilo bag of rice each month, plus health care and one meal a day. The Filipinos here also get free Internet phone and Web access, which many use for hours after work because they don't have home phones." Well, we're just thrilled to hear that the benefits of globalization include jobs for Filipinos at triple the local minimum wage, but it would be nice if Mr. Friedman would tell us what exactly the local minimum wage is, in dollars. That way we could compare it to the wage that American workers would earn for performing similar tasks. Our bet is that, if these Filipino AOL workers can't afford phones in their homes, their wages are pretty low by American standards. We also wonder if they have the right to organize and bargain collectively in labor unions. There's probably a comparative advantage for AOL in locating these call centers overseas, but leaving out these two relevant facts makes the Times columnist seem more like a propagandist for globalization than a fair-minded observer. Granted, he's a columnist, but even propaganda is more convincing if it takes into account and respectfully dismantles the opposing arguments, rather than sneering at the opponents, as Mr. Friedman does, as "a rogue's gallery of Communists, anarchists, protectionist unions and over-fed Yuppies out for their 1960's fix."

"Even": "Even" is always a word to watch out for in news stories as an indication of bias. Check out this sentence from today's front-page news story on the approval of an abortion pill: "Beyond that, side effects like excessive bleeding are extremely rare in first-trimester abortions, and abortions are legal even into the third trimester of pregnancy in some states." It's strange to see, coming from the Times, but the word "even" there seems to be a nudge from the reporter to the effect of, "Gee, can you believe that in some states they allow the murder of unborn children even in the third trimester?" The sentence would have done fine with the word "even" excised.

Harvard: A day after running a photo of someone wrongly identified as the provost of Harvard University, the New York Times today messes up yet another reference to the college mockingly described by a columnist at the Sulzberger family's Boston cash-cow, the Globe, as WGU (World's Greatest University). A Public Lives profile in today's Times makes reference to "the Harvard School of Public Policy." There is no such school; Harvard's graduate school of public policy is called the Kennedy School of Government. The reference is in a quotation, but the right move for the Times would have been to make the words lowercase or to paraphrase.

What is it with the New York Times that it just can't spell names correctly?

There are two howlers in this morning's paper. The "Making Books" column in the arts section makes reference to "Opra Winfrey's book club." Ms. Winfrey is one of the most famous celebrities in America. Her name adorns her television show and the covers of countless magazines. She spells her first name "Oprah," with an "h" at the end.

In the national section, a news story that runs under the headline "Republicans Call Gore Solicitation Misleading" quotes "Ian Striton, an F.E.C. spokesman." On second reference, the Federal Election Commission spokesman is referred to as "Mr. Striton." The spokesman's last name in fact is "Stirton." This error is egregious because it marks the second time in a month that the Times has managed to misspell Mr. Stirton's name. The September 9 edition of Smartertimes.com pointed out the first error, which occurred in the September 9 edition of the New York Times. But the error is particularly egregious because on Monday, September 25, the Times ran a correction of the initial mistake. That correction said, "An article on Sept. 9 about Aristotle International, a political consulting firm that has compiled the nation's largest voter databank, misspelled the surname of a Federal Election Commission spokesman who commented on the use of the commission data for commercial purposes. He is Ian Stirton, not Sturton." So, even after running a correction in Monday's paper with the correct spelling of this man's name, the Times still manages to bungle the spelling of the name in Thursday's paper.

All of this may strike the average reader as nitpicking or trivial. But the Times routinely pounces on Republican politicians for lesser mistakes -- remember how long we heard about Dan Quayle's misspelling of "potato," and about George W. Bush's defense of his "subliminable" advertising? Those mistakes are made by politicians speaking off the cuff, without the safeguards the Times has of layer upon layer of highly paid and experienced editors whose job is, among other things, to spell names correctly. No one is expecting 100% accuracy on this, but the Times isn't anywhere near what other industries would consider an acceptable level of quality control.

Bush Leads in a Tie: Now that George W. Bush is pulling ahead of Al Gore in some national polls, the Times has decided to declare Mr. Bush's lead to be nonexistent. Hard to believe, but that is what's going on in a story in the national section that runs today under the headline, "Despite Ups and Downs, Surveys Show Race is Tied." This is how the New York Times interprets a new L.A. Times poll showing Mr. Bush with a six-point lead 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 Washington Post's Richard Morin and Claudia Deane took up this issue yesterday, interviewing five polling experts. All five of those experts -- Warren Mitofsky, Paul Lavrakas, Jim Beniger, Philip Meyer and Larry McGill -- gave exactly the opposite assessment. The five Washington Post experts said a lead is a lead, not a tie or a "statistical tie," even if the lead is within the poll's margin of error. It's interesting that the Times has suddenly decided to air its unconventional views on poll interpretation now that Mr. Bush is experiencing a boost in the polls.

Wrong Photo Cutline: A photo cutline in the national section of today's New York Times identifies a man speaking at a congressional hearing on AIDS prevention as the provost of Harvard University, Harvey Fineberg. While it may be Fineberg out of focus in the left background of the photo, the large, in-focus man with the moustache who is at the center of the photo is not Fineberg, but someone else.

You might expect that, after running a highly unusual and lengthy editor's note that publicly regretted aspects of its handling of the Wen Ho Lee story, the New York Times would take extra-special care to make sure that its next news story about the Lee case was letter-perfect. Well, the Times waddles back into the story today with a front-page dispatch that is riddled with sloppiness.

Most outrageous is a headline that runs with the continuation of the article inside the paper. The headline reads, "Reno and Freeh Still Insisting That Los Alamos Scientist Committed Crime." Beyond the redundancy of "still insist" (someone call William Safire's Squad Squad), the headline suggests that that there is still some doubt about whether Lee committed a crime. In fact, that point is settled. Mr. Lee pleaded guilty to a felony. What is the Times getting at here? It sounds like the Times editors wanted the full headline to read, "Reno and Freeh Still Insisting That Los Alamos Scientist Committed Crime, Even After Yesterday's Editor's Note In The Times Acknowledging Regrets About Newspaper's Coverage."

Even if the Times editors are still insisting that there's nothing wrong with the "Still Insisting" headline, they've got to acknowledge it is sloppy in today's story to keep switching the honorific for "a former top government nuclear weapons designer," John L. Richter. The first four times Richter appears in the story, he is "Mr." Richter; the final two references are to "Dr." Richter. What, was the guy awarded a medical degree exactly two-thirds of the way through his interview with the Times?

The Times story in my New York edition also contains the following glitch: "Mr. Richter's comments came after pullback came after T.J. Gauthier, the deputy Energy secretary, said at the hearing. . ." The sentence needs either the word "comments" or the word "pullback" but not both, and it only needs the words "came after" once.

Other than the headline, this stuff is fairly minor, and would be unexceptional, except for the fact that, the day after running the long self-flagellating article about its own coverage, you might expect that the Times would take extra-special care to get everything right the next day.

Smoke 'Em With Your Parents: A column on the New York Times education page today criticizes school programs designed to educate students against illegal drugs. Here is the Times columnist's parenting advice: "Parents should insist that children have safe places to go with friends and that they know not to drive when 'high.' But threats of parental suicide and heartbreak may lead to secret experimentation in risky settings or with friends that parents neither know or approve."

This is a classic. How would the Times like children to experiment with drugs, if not in "secret"? Does it want the kids to toke up at the kitchen table with mom watching? Does the Times's attitude toward such experimentation extend to tobacco smoking or only to illicit narcotics? Times editorials and news stories have demonized the tobacco industry for encouraging tobacco use among children, but now we have a Times columnist encouraging parents to encourage their children to smoke dope, as long as the children don't drive and as long as it is in the company of friends that the parents approve of. How are the parents supposed to make sure that their children's drug use is done in the company of approved friends? Should mom invite the child's "approved" buddies over to get high around the kitchen table? At what age should this parentally endorsed drug-use start? There may be problems with drug abuse prevention policies in this country, but the Times-Cali Drug Cartel approach to parenting seems a less-than-ideal solution.

Wrong Photos: The business section of the Times today miscaptions the photos of D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals judges Harry Edwards and David Sentelle, thus accomplishing an implicit race and ideology transplant, since Judge Edwards is black and liberal while Judge Sentelle is white and constantly under fire as too friendly with Jesse Helms. Walter Olson of Overlawyered.com noticed this and pointed it out to Smartertimes.com.

Wrong Wattage: A story in the metro section of today's Times reports on a new Spanish-language news radio station launching in New York. The story reports that the station will broadcast at 5,000 "megawatts," and that other, larger stations, transmit at 50,000 megawatts. As an astute Smartertimes.com reader, Bill Schweber, in Newton, Mass. points out, "No way! A megawatt is a million watts, and the maximum allowed for any station is 50,000 watts." The Times should have said watts, not megawatts.

Late Again: The Times national section reports today that the American government is suing Harvard University for damages in connection with a project in Russia by the Harvard Institute for International Development. That's old news to readers of the Wall Street Journal, which carried an article about the planned suit yesterday on page A4.

This morning's New York Times, at page A2, contains an unusual and lengthy mea culpa by the Times with respect to its coverage of the Wen Ho Lee nuclear secrets case. The article, unsigned but slugged "From the Editors," is subtle and nuanced. We had to read it over several times before we could tell whether it was an apology or a defense. In fact, it's a little of both. The article says, "On the whole, we remain proud of work that brought into the open a major national security problem of which officials had been aware for months, even years." But the article also says, "looking back, we also found some things we wish we has done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt."

Well, of course, looking back, there are things the Times wishes it had done differently. That is the nature of daily newspapering, which, as the Times correctly points out, "is performed under deadline pressure, with the best assessment of information available at the time." The best way to deal with these sorts of regrets and second thoughts is by printing follow-up stories, as the Times has done, rather than by engaging in the sort of painstaking public self-examination that the Times engages in today. What's interesting is why the Times caved in in this case, and engaged in this unusually detailed self-criticism. Why did it devote so much space and attention to its supposed errors in the Wen Ho Lee case and not to confessing its bias against George W. Bush, or its errors in reporting the supposed melting of the North Pole, or its manufacturing of a backlash against the Boy Scouts for their rules against gays?

The Times has duly corrected some of these other errors, but with nothing like the public self-flagellation that characterizes today's "From the Editors" note about Wen Ho Lee. It's hard to assess the newspaper's motivations, but it's probably not merely a coincidence that in the Wen Ho Lee case the newspaper's coverage was being attacked by critics on the political left motivated by anti-anti-Communism and by an Asian-American identity politics that feeds on the notion of victimhood and false persecution. The Times is naturally more sympathetic to such criticism, because on the whole, it shares the ideological suppositions of those critics with respect to Communism and racism. It's a credit to the Times that the original Lee reporting was able to make its way into the paper despite those ideological barriers. What the editor's note represents is the Times reverting to its standard ideological assumptions, which is too bad.

It's Not a Cut: In an article in its national section today, the Times lets Al Gore get away with the false charge that "Mr. Bush commended" a 1995 "House Republican plan to cut $270 billion over seven years from Medicare, the federal health insurance program for the elderly." We don't know how many times we are going to have to explain this, but here it goes again: A reduction in the rate of growth is not a "cut." If it is, then Mr. Gore himself, and President Clinton, wanted to "cut" Medicare by $124 billion over seven years, according to a September 27, 1996 Times article. Medicare spending skyrocketed to $177 billion in 1996 from $53 billion in 1983, according to a 1996 article in Reason magazine. The Republican proposed "cuts" actually were a 40% increase over current levels of Medicare spending. The Democratic willingness to attack the Republicans for "cuts," when what the Republicans wanted to do was take Medicare spending from $4,800 per recipient in 1995 to $6,700 per recipient in 2002, was so breathtaking that CNN's Wolf Blitzer even asked President Clinton about it at a 1996 press conference: "Mr. President, your most recent Clinton-Gore campaign commercials still speak about Republican cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. Speaker Gingrich points out repeatedly that these aren't 'cuts' in Medicare and Medicaid; they are simply cuts in the projected growth of Medicare and Medicaid, which you in your own seven-year balanced budget proposal similarly propose. Are you prepared to stop calling the Republican savings in Medicare and Medicaid 'cuts'?" The Times' answer is apparently, "No."

It's almost comical to watch the Times try to grasp this point. A story in the metro section today about the race for U.S. Senate in New Jersey paraphrases a spokesman for Rep Bob Franks, a Republican, complaining about commercials running in support of the Democratic candidate: "For example, he said, they have given the impression that he voted to cut Medicare spending, when in fact he voted on reductions in future Medicare and Medicaid spending." This is an attempt to get the difference straight, but it still doesn't accurately portray what happened on the Medicare issue. Mr. Franks didn't vote to reduce future Medicare spending; he voted to increase Medicare spending in absolute terms while reducing the rate of growth.

An editorial in this morning's New York Times about plans for Governors Island in New York Harbor gives a good indication of how the newspaper feels about cars. The editorial speaks of two historic fortresses that would be preserved on the island, and then it says, "The rest of the island, which is a seven-minute ferry ride from Manhattan, would revert to the state and could then be developed, possibly in accord with preliminary plans for parks, tennis courts, museums, motels and a conference center, blissfully free of private automobiles."

Also "blissfully free of private automobiles," if the Times gets its way, would be a football stadium on the West Side of Manhattan. An editorial in today's Times about that proposal takes the position that, "to avoid traffic congestion and air pollution, the project has to be served primarily by mass transit rather than automobiles."

Well, for a newspaper whose Sunday magazine is fat with ads from Lexus, Mercedes and BMW, and whose weekend classified sections are fat with ads from auto dealerships, this is a strange position. If the Times really feels this way about automobiles, maybe it should do what it did with cigarettes and announce that it will refuse the advertising on principle. Then again, perhaps what really bothers the Times editorialists aren't automobiles, but "private" automobiles. Maybe it's not driving that the Times objects to, but private ownership of them, which, after all, has a whiff of -- perish the thought -- capitalism.

Lewis and Indyk: A news story in the international section of this morning's New York Times reports on reaction to the suspension of the security clearance of Martin Indyk, America's ambassador to Israel. Samuel Lewis is quoted strongly defending Mr. Indyk against charges that he violated security regulations, saying, "there are scores of us, hundreds of us who have done similar things because there is no other way to do your job." Mr. Lewis is identified by the Times only as America's "ambassador to Israel from 1977 to 1985." But in fact, Mr. Lewis was a member of the board of advisers of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy when Mr. Indyk was the institute's executive director. He later served on the staff of the institute, which Mr. Indyk founded. Including those facts in the Times article would have been helpful to readers evaluating the credibility of Mr. Lewis's defense of Mr. Indyk.

The "Men's Fashions of the Times" supplement to The New York Times magazine today features a wonderful article by a Times film critic about the critic's father, who, at age 62, "had been up and on his feet working for 48 hours, and had walked a mile and a half in the snow a couple of times." The critic's father worked in a commercial laundry and in a dairy. The article says, "The lessons I learned from him are that there are no bad jobs, and that hard work never killed anybody, though it might make you wish you were dead." Those are wonderful lessons, and it is a wonderful article, worth wading through the cologne ads in the fashion supplement to read. It manages in a non-patronizing way to convey the dignity of work while also making a point about economic mobility in America -- "I worked those jobs so you didn't have to," the Times critic quotes his father as saying.

So it's all the more disappointing, just when the Times gives an indication of understanding the American work ethic, to have the same newspaper, on the same day, include in its metro section a large photograph and an article about the plight of one Joseph Capestany. Mr. Capestany, the article tells us, is 44 and has AIDS. He is "a former heroin addict now enrolled in a methadone maintenance program." He is well enough, apparently, to have completed "an eight-week course on AIDS advocacy," to work "several afternoons a week" as a volunteer for "the New York City AIDS Housing Network, an advocacy group." He is well enough to have shown up at a city service center "every single day" from late June to early August, the article reports. So why is the Times writing about Mr. Capestany? He is upset that the city government has not been quick enough in paying his rent. In all seriousness, this is what the Times article is about. The daily visits to the city service center were "to prod caseworkers into speeding up paperwork so that he could rent an apartment in the Bronx." Mr. Capestany "finally got his apartment, though he said the division was currently late in paying this month's rent to his landlord." He complains that the city service center has too few staff members: "you only have a handful of them, and there's too many people to be serviced."

The Times's account of Mr. Capestany's situation is entirely sympathetic to him, right down to the headline: "AIDS Patients Frustrated Over Shoddy Service From City." The ones who should be "frustrated" here are taxpayers like the film critic's father, who traipsed through the snow to work backbreaking jobs and who paid his taxes -- only to see those tax dollars transferred to those like Mr. Capestany, who, even after the end of welfare as we know it, still gets the city to pay his rent and then has the nerve to complain about the service. Instead of volunteering as an AIDS advocate, why doesn't Mr. Capestany get a paying job and write his own rent checks instead of waiting for them to be issued by the government from the hard-earned money of those like the film-critic's father?

Ignoring Nader: The lead editorial in this morning's New York Times compares the positions of Al Gore and George W. Bush on health care. The Times's priority is universal health insurance coverage, and it finds both Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush disappointing. "Though it is unconscionable that the richest country in the world refuses to cover the insurance needs of all its residents, neither candidate proposes to do much about the problem anytime soon," the Times writes.

If the Times really cares about universal coverage, it ought to have considered Ralph Nader in its editorial. Nader's position on health insurance sounds right in line with that of the Times. On the Nader campaign web site, the candidate is quoted as calling for "universal health care from the cradle through the nursing home, with a single-payer system like Canada's." But the Times editorial today instead ignores Mr. Nader. In the past, the Times has even gone beyond ignoring Mr. Nader to criticize Mr. Nader's candidacy for potentially siphoning votes away from Mr. Gore.

Lost in Boston: An article in the travel section of today's New York Times is written by someone who purports to be a native of Boston. The article nevertheless manages to refer to "the Isabella Stewart Gardiner." This is a reference to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Gardner spelled her last name without an "i," and the museum is named after her. The Times article got the name wrong.

Lost in Brooklyn: An article in the metro section of this morning's Times uncovers the shocking fact that Orthodox Jews go on dates in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. But anyone who has spent any time at the garden would know that one of the wonderful things about it is that all kinds of New Yorkers go on dates there. On any weekend day you can see African-American couples, Russian immigrant couples, Indian-American couples, white yuppies, Chinese-American couples -- you name it. The article depicts the Orthodox Jews frolicking in the garden as participating in some kind of obscure and unusual mating ritual, when in fact they are just acting like the rest of their Brooklyn neighbors of all religions and cultural backgrounds.

Immigrants: In its third big story in four days relating to the two workers from Mexico who were assaulted by whites in Long Island who lured them with an offer of work, the Times is still not telling readers whether the two assault victims were legal or illegal immigrants, or whether they could work legally in America. The long front-page story in this morning's paper about workers of the sort who were assaulted adds some interesting details -- the workers "relieve themselves or smoke a little pot" in a clump of trees near a 7-Eleven, and on Friday and Saturday nights they patronize prostitutes that arrive in vans from Queens. But the article fails to place the experiences of the workers and their neighbors in the context of the national policy debate about levels of immigration to America.

In an editorial today and in the lead story in its metro section, the New York Times sides with Rep. Rick Lazio in arguing that voters would be better off if the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO and the "National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League" weren't allowed to run any advertisements during the campaign between Mr. Lazio and Hillary Rodham Clinton for election to the U.S. Senate. Under the Times-Lazio principle, elections are better if there is less political speech. This may be in line with Nixon-era federal election laws, but it is totally at odds with what the Founders had in mind when they framed the First Amendment, with its provision that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Mr. Lazio and the Times can argue that what they are calling for at the moment is not a Congressional restriction but a voluntary agreement, but in fact both have endorsed proposals that would restrict issue advertising by independent groups. Such proposals, and even a voluntary "soft-money ban," go directly against the wisdom of the Founders, who realized that unrestricted speech was necessary for the functioning of a robust democracy, and in fact a sign of it. Mrs. Clinton is wrong to mouth approval of such measures in principle, and she is almost certainly motivated by reasons of her own political advantage in refusing to agree to them in practice. But if she persists in resisting a "soft-money ban," she will deserve praise for taking an action that results in allowing more voices to participate in the democratic process. Instead of such praise, the Times and Mr. Lazio are showering her with contempt. Mr. Lazio calls her "the queen of dirty money." The Times claims that "soft money" has "damaged and corrupted the political system." That's ridiculous. What the Times calls "soft money" and Mr. Lazio calls "dirty money" is merely the product of working men and women and environmentalists and abortion rights supporters banding together to make their views known on the eve of an election. What could be cleaner or more American than that? It's not "dirty money," it's speech. "Dirty money" would be an accurate term for a bribe, or for a political payoff. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about money being spent on television commercials that express opinions about issues and policy positions taken by candidates. The Times makes its views known every day in its editorial column, protected by the same First Amendment that should protect the rights of the Sierra Club and the AFL-CIO and NARAL and, for that matter, the National Rifle Association and the Christian Coalition and the Tobacco Institute and the Business Roundtable. The Times' news story today and its editorial don't even acknowledge the existence of this view, much less convincingly rebut it.

La Guardia Traffic: An editorial in today's New York Times titled "Gridlock at La Guardia," along with a news story in the metro section, calls for additional government regulation to prevent air-traffic delays at La Guardia Airport in New York. The news story quotes Rep. Nita Lowey as saying, "The airlines want to make money, but they have a responsibility to ensure customer satisfaction." We have a substantial reservoir of affection for Ms. Lowey, but she may have been reading the Times for too long. She has apparently succumbed to the newspaper's theory that making money and satisfying customers are two opposing forces, and that making money is something corporations do, while satisfying customers is something that government regulators do. Anyone who flies out of La Guardia knows to expect delays. The airlines even factor in time spent waiting on the ground when they tell you the scheduled arrival time of their flights. If, for some reason, a traveler abhors waiting on the ground, the traveler could take Amtrak or fly out of White Plains or Islip. But the idea that the passengers need the government to protect them from the delays that the money-hungry airlines are just aching to impose on them just goes against the way that successful companies behave in free markets. The editor of Smartertimes.com spent an hour and a half sitting in a plane delayed on a La Guardia runway the other day, and it was clear from the pilot's frequent apologies over the public address system that he couldn't have had a higher priority than customer satisfaction. The pilot's final announcement was something to the effect of, "If you look out the right side of the plane you'll get a pretty good view of Air Force Two right there. That's the reason we've been stuck here, and now that it's taking off we should be on our way in just a few minutes." In other words, if Ms. Lowey and the Times are so concerned about the flight delays at New York airports, they might ease off the airlines and take a tougher look at the effects of Air Hillary, Air Gore and Air Clinton on flight traffic patterns in the region.

Jews: The Times "Arts & Ideas" section today runs a silly article about American Jews that is so flawed that we don't have the time or the inclination to correct it fully here. The story builds to a whopper of a conclusion, in which a rabbi proposes that the Jewish community greet those Jews returning from meetings of Jews for Jesus by saying, "You've explored truth in many ways, some that really touched your soul. We'd love to learn from you about what you saw and heard." This is taken seriously by the Times, which fails to signal any understanding that Judaism and Christianity are separate religions, and that Judaism can't in any honest, self-consistent way describe a Jew's visit to a Jews for Jesus meeting as having anything to do with soul-touching truth.

Newsday in Washington: The Business section of the New York Times today contains an article about one of the Times' main competitors for national and international news, the Washington Post. The Times story includes the following sentence: "Mr. Graham's strategy of making the most of the newspaper's near-monopoly position in its region paid off for years; until three years ago, when it was supplanted by Newsday." This is absurd. Mr. Graham's strategy is still paying off, and Newsday, a Long Island, New York, newspaper, barely circulates in the Washington D.C. area. A reader who continues on can figure out that the Times has mistakenly put a semicolon where there should have been a period, and a period where there should have been a comma. The way the article should have read was, "Mr. Graham's strategy of making the most of the newspaper's near-monopoly position in its region paid off for years. Until three years ago, when it was supplanted by Newsday, the Post had the greatest household penetration of any large newspaper in the country."

Princeton's Bank Account: An article in the metro section of today's Times reports that Princeton University's president, Harold Shapiro, has announced his intention to step down. "Princeton now has more than $8 billion in the bank, four times what it had when Dr. Shapiro arrived." Princeton may well have an endowment of more than $8 billion, but we doubt that it is kept "in the bank," as the Times claims. Probably it is kept with a variety of money-management firms that invest it in private equity, stocks, bonds and other assets. Some of those money-management firms may be banks, but it's not as though a university handles an $8 billion endowment as though it were a child's passbook savings account.

The New York Times today manages to misspell the names of two well-known political figures. The first is the press secretary to the Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott. The spokesman's name is John Czwartacki; a story in the national section of today's Times renders it as "Czartacki." The second is a secretary of the interior during the Reagan administration, James Watt; a column on the op-ed page today refers to him as "Watts." Each is off by merely a letter, and readers get the general idea of whom the Times is writing about. But basic journalistic craft dictates that a newspaper is supposed to spell names correctly. If a newspaper can't manage to spell names correctly, readers might get the idea that the newspaper is careless about facts. Those careless habits may also carry over into more substantive matters, as they often do at the Times.

Stock Market "Loner": A story in yesterday's Times about a 15-year-old stock market manipulator in New Jersey reported that the young man "was described as a loner." Smartertimes.com nearly mocked the phrase at the time, because it is such a time-worn term in crime stories. You can almost picture the reporter leading the boy's classmates to the conclusion by asking the question directly: "So, was he a loner?" The reporter, of course, was merely following the instructions of some editor, who at some point probably taught the reporter, "Make sure you find out if the kid was either an honor student or a loner." Virtually all young criminals fall into the loner mold, just as all crime and accident victims fall into the honor student mold, to judge by the newspaper accounts. The trouble is, as today's follow-up story in the Times metro section shows, the facts don't always fit with the story dictated by the hoary journalistic conventions. The youth who was described in yesterday's paper as a "loner" is described in today's paper as having been a member of a three-person stock tournament team named Triple Threat and as a partner with another classmate in two Internet companies. There's no reference in today's story to him being a "loner," and no explanation of why yesterday's story suggested, apparently incorrectly, that he was one.

Berenson and the 10 Jews: To get a good idea of where the Times stands politically, compare its coverage of the Lori Berenson case and that of the 10 Jews imprisoned in Iran. Ms. Berenson is one Jewish woman that the Times itself acknowledged in an editorial today "may well have had some involvement with the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, which sought to overthrow the government" in Peru. The Tupac Amaru are a Communist terrorist group. The 10 Iranian Jews are accused of spying for Israel and America, and there is absolutely no evidence that they did so other than their own coerced confessions. Neither the Iranian Jews nor Ms. Berenson has had the benefit of what Americans would consider due process. Yet the Times has been crusading on behalf of Ms. Berenson with a series of prominently placed news stories capped by today's editorial. The Iranians -- remember there are ten of them, and, unlike Ms. Berenson, they apparently did absolutely nothing wrong -- have gotten some coverage, but it has been less prominent than the coverage of Ms. Berenson. Today, for example, the Times places on its front page a story about Iranian women getting nose jobs, relegating to an inside page the news that an Iranian appeals court had substantively refused to overturn the verdicts against the ten Jews. One could argue that the Times is paying more attention to Ms. Berenson because her parents are from the Upper West Side, but the Iranian Jews also have relatives in Great Neck, N.Y., in Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the Times' readership areas.

The lead news story in this morning's New York Times, about a statement by Independent Counsel Robert Ray concerning the Clintons and Whitewater, put it about right: "The report's conclusions also appeared to largely undercut concerns that it was unfair to Mrs. Clinton for Mr. Ray to issue a statement only weeks before she faces Representative Rick Lazio, a Republican Congressman from Long Island, in the Senate voting."

Among those whose "concerns" have been "undercut" is none other than the New York Times itself, which wrote in an August 30 editorial, "If Mr. Ray cares at all about his credibility, and about whether the public sees his report as an objective document or a time bomb lobbed at Mrs. Clinton's campaign, he will delay it until after the election."

Apparently, the Times' undoubtedly sincere concern about Mr. Ray's "credibility" has evaporated now that Mr. Ray has found that there isn't enough evidence in the Whitewater case to prove the Clintons guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In an editorial today, the Times calls for Mr. Ray's full report to "be released so that the public can draw its own conclusions."

Now that it is clear that the report lets the Clintons off fairly easily, the Times favors its immediate release so that the public can draw its own conclusions. Just three weeks ago, when Mr. Ray's conclusions were unknown, the Times favored withholding the report from the public until after the election. Today's Times editorial gives no explanation for the newspaper's sudden about-face. One could almost think the newspaper is rooting against Mr. Lazio.

Economic Scene: The "Economic Scene" column in the business section of today's Times considers the practice of "differential pricing," which is in the news lately as it apples to pharmaceutical companies charging different prices to consumers in America and in Canada. The column goes on for a while about the medicine price issue before reaching the following conclusion: "When it allows markets to be served that would otherwise be ignored, price discrimination will tend to be socially useful. But if differential pricing is just an excuse to raise prices that would otherwise be low, it doesn't have much to recommend it." We wonder if the Times would be willing to apply that same test not only to the medicine companies' practice of charging different prices in different places, but to the newspaper company's practice of charging $2.50 for a copy of the Sunday Times in New York City, and $4.00 outside the Boston-Washington corridor.

Still Ignorant on Immigrants: A front-of-the-metro-section story on the assault in Long Island on two immigrant workers from Mexico omits for the second day in a row the relevant fact of whether the assault victims were in America legally or illegally and whether they had the appropriate work documents.

Military Backs Bush: A front-page New York Times story today reports that the military is backing George W. Bush in the presidential election. What is this assertion based on? According to the article, "about 20 interviews." Well, the military may well be backing Bush in the election, but you don't have to be a pollster or a social scientists to know that 20 interviews isn't enough to get an accurate portrayal of the views of the entire active-duty American military.

"Free Economic Counseling": A dispatch from Mizpe Ramon, Israel, in the international section of this morning's Times reports that a couple from the Haifa area showed up at the Mizpe Ramon factory "offering free economic counseling. 'They touched our hearts,' said Anat Cohen, a worker." What do they mean, "economic counseling"? Is that like management consulting? Or is it like personal financial planning? How about an explanation?

A story on the front of the metro section in today's New York Times reports on an attack against two Mexican immigrants on Long Island. The two Mexican immigrants were lured by their white assailants with a promise of work, says the Times article, which also says that police are investigating the assault as a bias crime. The article notes that lawmakers in the area where the attack took place have been pressing for a crackdown against illegal immigration.

There's a relevant fact missing from today's Times article: whether the two assault victims are legal or illegal immigrants. It may also be that they were here legally on tourist visas but lacked the permits necessary to work legally in America. The Times suggests the attack was caused in some way by racial tensions inflamed by the crackdown against illegal immigrants. That's the Times's standard analytic framework -- racism causes most social problems. But there are other ways of looking at these sorts of social problems. For instance, a case can be made that what put these workers in a position to be taken advantage of is an excess of government regulation -- in this case, the absurdly low numbers of legal immigrant workers allowed into America from Mexico. Because of these restrictions on the labor market and on the legal movement of persons across borders, immigrants must sneak into America and work on an informal, cash basis. When the immigrant workers arrive, they lack documentation and are afraid of being deported, so they avoid contact with the police and are unlikely to take advantage of the protections that other laborers in America receive under American laws. So rather than interpreting this as a story about racism, as the Times does, it could just as easily be interpreted as a story about the over-regulation of the labor market and about the restrictions on freedom of movement.

About That Office Shortage: Yesterday's lead story in the New York Times about the office space shortage reported that "there is little vacant space available and, despite the demand, little new construction." Today's metro section contains two stories that, unlike yesterday's article, indicate some of the reasons for the lack of new construction. The first reports on a hearing before the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission about a new $55-million front entrance for the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The Times article reports, "The commission took no action yesterday on the proposal. 'We'll need to take some time to absorb it,' said Jennifer L. Raab, the chairwoman. The commission, she said, will hold another hearing on the proposal in October, and she invited all interested parties to weigh in." Another metro section story, about plans for a new home for the Skyscraper Museum, reports that "The reflective theme will be carried over to a 15-foot-long display area on the mezzanine level that will, if the Buildings Department approves, cantilever over the sidewalk." One of the reasons that there is so little new construction is that even projects undertaken by non-profit groups with support from the city must make their way over a series of onerous regulatory hurdles such as the Landmarks Commission and the Buildings Department. Imagine, then, the treatment that could be expected by a for-profit developer without the city behind him. Simplifying and speeding up those approval processes would go a long way toward easing the office space shortage the Times is so concerned about.

Bush-Bashing: In a routine profile on the Times education page of the man who is in charge of school lunches in the New York City public schools, the man is quoted as saying, "It's very easy to take a free kick against school lunch. It's just about the easiest kick you can make. Except George Bush." Mr. Bush has really nothing to do with this story, and some would argue that Al Gore is a pretty easy kick as well. The Times would have done better to truncate this quote rather sharing the easy joke with the school lunch man. Including it without any further explanation seems to suggest that the school lunch man, the Times reporter and all Times readers take as a given the notion that a politician that half of America is about to vote for is some sort of pitiable object on the order of a forlorn school-cafeteria turnip.

This morning's New York Times, in a front-page news story, blames capitalism and the defeat of the Soviet Union for the existence of prostitution. In the article, slugged "Crossing Borders: The Sex Trade," the Times reports that "Communism put women to work; post-cold-war capitalism does not necessarily do so." Unemployed women are therefore fleeing Russia to come work as prostitutes in "West Europe," the article says. "Wealth is widespread, but so is alienation; sex has been commercialized like everything else. Fast money is in; so is fast sex," the Times article says.

The Times dispatch from the Czech Republic makes further claims about why prostitution wasn't a problem under communism: "Under the former Communist government, Gypsies had jobs, however menial, and overt racism was repressed, although a contentious program involving paid sterilization also existed. The women here from Belarus, Bulgaria, Russia and elsewhere would also have had jobs." The article quotes a Berlin police official saying that "Poverty was not the same in Communist societies. What we are facing now is people moving because of the poverty they face."

This is just patently absurd. The Times is falling completely for one of the oldest -- and falsest -- Red Soviet communist propaganda claims: the claim that there was no prostitution under communism.

An Associated Press dispatch from Moscow in 1986 provides some useful context. The AP story began: "The Kremlin has claimed for generations that communism wiped out prostitution but now admits it didn't." The AP article reported that "For decades, prostitutes were officially declared to be phenomena of capitalist exploitation, unemployment and drug abuse. 'In the U.S.S.R.,' says the Soviet Encyclopedia, 'prostitution has been liquidated. The conditions which create it and feed it have disappeared.'"

Today's Times dispatch echoes the propaganda claims of the Soviet Encyclopedia, a notorious text that was regularly revised as communist politicians fell in and out of favor. Even the Soviet press in 1986 knew better. The AP reported then that "In an expose on prostitution in Minsk, the national youth daily Komsomolskaya Pravda said there also is 'an alarming situation in Moscow, Leningrad, Riga and other large centers.' 'We have to acknowledge: a wanton "business" exists,' it said. 'For many years, we pretended that we didn't notice anything.'"

Fourteen years after the newsmen at Komsomolskaya Pravda stopped pretending not to notice that there was prostitution in the Soviet Union under communism, the New York Times is still clinging to the Soviet propaganda claims. It's embarrassing -- especially considering that the author of that nifty 1986 Associated Press dispatch was a correspondent named Andrew Rosenthal, who is now a major league editor at the New York Times.

A close reading of the Times dispatch suggests that a more likely explanation for the clusters of prostitutes the story describes is not the fall of communism but rather the failure to fully eradicate one of the most nefarious aspects of the communist system -- the restrictions on the free movement of persons across borders. If Germany, or, for that matter, America, would open its borders to more immigrants, the women described in the Times article could find legal work there instead of being trapped in prostitution on the Czech side of the border.

Office Shortage: In another front-page story today, the Times declares a shortage in office space in New York City. There's so much muddy thinking in the story that we don't have time to sort through it all. Just for starters, though, the Times claims that Internet companies have moved into "the Brooklyn waterfront from the Brooklyn Bridge south to Sunset Park." In fact, the area of Brooklyn being most heavily promoted to Internet companies is the Dumbo neighborhood, which is north of the Brooklyn Bridge and south of the Manhattan Bridge. The article goes on and on with handwringing about how manufacturing jobs are leaving Manhattan without mentioning that the New York Times company itself has moved its printing operations out of Times Square to plants in Edison, New Jersey, and in a far corner of Queens. The Times's preferred solution to the office space crunch seems to be more government planning: "a concerted effort on the part of the city's political leaders." The problem is that when the city's political leaders make any efforts to make the city more business-friendly or construction-friendly across the board -- for instance, proposing to relax building codes, lower taxes, reduce environmental regulations or streamline community approval processes -- the Times stands athwart the reforms.

Taking It From Both Sides: In an editorial today, the New York Times claims that Al Gore "has been able to show that his programs benefit middle-income families, while Mr. Bush's policies seem tailored to corporate interests and the well-to-do." In a news story today on Mr. Bush's prescription drug plan, which uses an approach also pushed by Senator William Roth, the Times writes that under the proposal, "states could use federal money to provide assistance to Medicare beneficiaries with annual incomes up to 75 percent above the poverty level -- up to $14,500 for individuals and $19,700 for couples." The news article reports that "officials worry that a limited assistance program, intended for low-income people, will undermine efforts to provide more comprehensive, more generous benefits as a standard part of Medicare."

In other words, in the same day, the Times manages (in the editorial) to attack George W. Bush for being too focused on the rich, and (in the news story) the Times manages to attack Mr. Bush for being too focused on the poor. It's enough to make a reader who didn't know any better think that, rather than really being concerned with the effects of policies on the rich or on the poor, the Times had some kind of agenda with respect to Mr. Bush. Smartertimes.com knows better, though, and would never accuse the Times of that kind of bias.

All Wet: A photo cutline in the metro section today identifies a new fountain at the Museum of Natural History as "the first in New York City intended for public frolicking." In fact, there is already a fountain at Carroll Park in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood in Brooklyn that is intended for public frolicking. Maybe the Times doesn't consider Brooklyn to be part of "New York City."

Lubavitch: A Times dispatch from Russia today refers repeatedly to the Chabad "Lubavich" movement. The Lubavitchers spell it Lubavitch, with a "t."

The Shah: A front-page Times dispatch about Russian and Iran today refers to Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi. The Times more frequently uses the spelling "Reza."