From a front-page New York Times news article about the entry into the presidential race of Governor Scott Walker, Republican of Wisconsin:

his repeated comments that the most important foreign policy decision of his lifetime was President Ronald Reagan's firing of air traffic controllers in 1981, because it got the attention of the Soviet Union, was a sign to some Republicans that Mr. Walker, who dropped out of Marquette University and has not traveled widely abroad, has a limited worldview.

From The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of His Conversion to Conservatism, by Thomas W. Evans:

The PATCO incident had consequences outside of the narrow labor area. As a top White House aide commented in an oral history interview years later, "I think what is extraordinary about it is the impact it had way beyond domestic politics. Especially when you listen to George Shultz or Henry Kissinger talk about the impact it had on foreign policy, it was stunning. Basically the impact was that [foreign leaders] said, 'Oh my God, this President took on the unions and did it. He might do other things.' Which was true, of course."

Evans footnotes that to an oral history interview with Reagan aide Martin Anderson.

Peggy Noonan, who also worked for Reagan, has also written about this: "Reagan's secretary of state George Shultz said that the Patco decision was the most important foreign-policy decision Reagan ever made."

Politico catches the New York Times keeping Senator Ted Cruz off the bestseller list despite the fact that his book has sold more copies than 18 of 20 books that will appear on the list. There are some interesting numbers in there about how many sales it takes to make it onto that list. (Interesting to authors, at least).

The Times prints an op-ed complaining about New England fishermen spending money to protect their economic interests:

Atlantic scallops are one of the most lucrative parts of the American fishing industry, responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shellfish every year. Scallop companies have a well-funded industry group, paradoxically named the Fisheries Survival Fund, which spends more than a quarter of a million dollars a year advocating for their interests, often at the expense of other fisheries.

"More than a quarter of a million dollars a year"? That's not a lot of money as advocacy spending goes. The author of the op-ed is doubtless well aware of that. The Times identifies him as Gib Brogan, "the fisheries campaign manager at Oceana, an environmental advocacy group." Oceana spent $22.5 million in 2014, according to its financial statement, or nearly 100 times of the scallop companies' expenditure that the Times is so worked up about. Oceana "was established in 2001 by a group of leading foundations — The Pew Charitable Trusts, Oak Foundation, Marisla Foundation (formerly Homeland Foundation), and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund," its website says. Pew has more than $6 billion in assets and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has about $860 million, so the idea that the "well-funded" group in this fight is the commercial fishermen rather than their nonprofit environmentalist enemies is laughable.

"CVS Health Quits U.S. Chamber Over Stance on Smoking" is the headline over an article on the front of the business section of the New York Times. The article uncritically lauds CVS for quitting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce after an earlier Times article faulting the chamber for defending the commercial interests overseas of member tobacco companies. From the Times article:

CVS, which last year stopped selling tobacco products in its stores, said the lobbying activity ran counter to its mission to improve public health.

"We were surprised to read recent press reports concerning the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's position on tobacco products outside the United States," David R. Palombi, a senior vice president at the company, said in a statement. "CVS Health's purpose is to help people on their path to better health, and we fundamentally believe tobacco use is in direct conflict with this purpose."

I swung by a CVS on the way to work and took some pictures.

Inside the store: The Times says CVS's mission is to improve public health. Photo/Smartertimes Staff

Inside CVS: Would you like your packaged doughnut covered with chocolate or confectioner's sugar? The Times says the store's mission is public health. Photo/Smartertimes staff

At CVS, candy bars claim the prime real estate near the cash register. The New York Times lauds the store for its mission of "public health." Photo/Smartertimes staff

The aisles are full of sugary carbonated drinks and chocolate-covered sugary doughnuts, and the valuable high-traffic space near the cash registers is devoted to candy. If CVS's mission were really "to improve public health" it would get rid of this stuff the day before yesterday. But in fact the company's mission is to make a profit, which is why it is reaping the wonderful public relations from the Times (and the associated government relations advantage with the Obama administration) for joining the Times-Obama campaign against tobacco. Some more skepticism on the part of the Times here would make for better journalism, but it is not clear to me that what is going on here is journalism, in the sense of truth-seeking. It seems to me that what is going on is more politics, or ganging up on an unpopular target.

To be clear, I am not a big defender of tobacco. I don't smoke and I think it is bad for you. It also bears mentioning that these same Timesmen who want tobacco off store shelves are the ones who think marijuana is medicine and want it legally available everywhere, a difference that seems less based on any science than on a kind of cultural sensibility.

"Personal Health" columnist Jane Brody uses her Times platform to complain about her grandchildren (and, implicitly, their parents). In the middle of an otherwise traditionally neutral and detached account of the effects of too much "screen time" on children, she writes:

Two of my grandsons, ages 10 and 13, seem destined to suffer some of the negative effects of video-game overuse. The 10-year-old gets up half an hour earlier on school days to play computer games, and he and his brother stay plugged into their hand-held devices on the ride to and from school. "There's no conversation anymore," said their grandfather, who often picks them up. When the family dines out, the boys use their devices before the meal arrives and as soon as they finish eating.

The paragraph struck this reader as strange. What do the grandsons have to say for themselves? What do their parents have to say for themselves? Does the tradition of journalistic fair play that allows a subject or target to defend himself or at least give his side of the story fall entirely by the wayside when the person being written about is the family member of a Times journalist? If it's too awkward to be fair, maybe the Times columnist should find families to write about in the Times other than her own. If the grandfather has a complaint about his grandchildren, wouldn't the thing to do be to take the matter up directly with them, or with their parents, rather than running to his wife the Times columnist for airing the matter in the newspaper?

One of the things I find most grating about the Times is the way it sometimes seems totally oblivious to the possibility that some Jews might take their religious law seriously.

This occurred to me the other day on reading a Mark Bittman column that goes on and on about what a fool anyone would be to cook with anything other than butter or lard. The possibility that someone might avoid lard because it isn't kosher, or might not want to cook with butter because of kosher restrictions against mixing milk and meat, is not mentioned or considered. (A 2014 interview with Mr. Bittman reported, "Bittman says he pretty much has had nothing to do with Judaism since he graduated from high school in 1967.")

Then there was the editorial in Friday's Times. mocking a $1,200-a-night spa hotel in Germany where rooms offer a switch that "allows a guest to disconnect from the digital world entirely" by activating copper plates that block wireless signals. The idea that observant Jews disconnect from the digital world for a whole day each week on the sabbath doesn't make it into the Times editorial, though it was the first thing that I (and probably lots of other observant Jewish readers) thought of when I read it.

An editorial in Saturday's Times is headlined "Jeb Bush Needs Some New Economic Advice." It is an entire article devoted to attacking the dean of Columbia Business School, Glenn Hubbard, suggesting, essentially, that Mr. Bush should not listen to Mr. Hubbard.

It's hypocritical of the Times to fault Mr. Bush for taking advice from Mr. Hubbard. If Dean Hubbard is such a beyond-the-pale nincompoop, why then has the Times itself been inflicting his views on its readers via the Times' own op-ed page, which has published not one, not two, not three, not four, but at least five pieces authored by the same economist that the newspaper is now insisting Jeb Bush ignore. It's almost enough to make one suspect that the problem the Times has is not with Mr. Hubbard or his ideas but with Mr. Bush. That at least would help explain why the Times isn't recommending that readers of its op-ed page stop listening to Mr. Hubbard's ideas, or that applicants to business school choose to avoid Columbia. It also explains why the Times didn't launch editorial attacks against Mr. Hubbard when he was an adviser to Mitt Romney. The problem the Times has seems to be narrowly targeted to Mr. Hubbard's potential influence on Jeb Bush.

What is it that has the Times so bent out of shape about Mr. Hubbard? The newspaper complains that he "was an architect of the big tax cuts in 2001, which favored the wealthy." This is the same 2001 tax cut that included a "rebate" of $300 or $600 for most taxpayers, and that created a new 10% bracket at the low end. If anything the problem with the 2001 cut was that it was insufficiently aimed at the top marginal rates and at investment income and it was phased in too slowly. So President Bush had to go back in 2003 for more tax cuts.

The Times' main complaint, though, is that Mr. Hubbard, as the editorial puts it, "argued that 'compensation didn't stagnate.' He said that wages have been stuck because of global competition but that employer-provided benefits for health and retirement have increased." Well where possibly could Mr. Hubbard have gotten that idea? Perhaps it was an August 28, 2006 article by Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt, reporting, "Until the last year, stagnating wages were somewhat offset by the rising value of benefits, especially health insurance, which caused overall compensation for most Americans to continue increasing." That article appeared in a newspaper called the New York Times, where Mr. Leonhardt is still employed.

I'm not exactly the president of the Glenn Hubbard fan club, though I did favorably review his 2013 book. In 2010 he signaled support for some tax increases as part of a debt and deficit reduction compromise, writing in the Times, "It is hard to share the view that no tax increase of any sort can figure in a fiscal solution." In a Wall Street Journal op-ed that same year, he advised the president and Congress to "propose significant, broad-based tax increases." But the point here isn't that Mr. Hubbard is perfect or that one needs to agree with everything he has ever written or said. The point is simply that the Times editorial is way off the mark in calling for Jeb Bush to disregard Mr. Hubbard's advice. On the basis of the editorial, Mr. Bush would better off disregarding the Times' advice.

At Bloomberg View, Megan McArdle does a fine job of debunking that recent front-page New York Times article claiming that homegrown right-wing extremists kill more Americans than Islamist jihadists do.

The Times seems to have finally found a form of regulation it doesn't like (other than those regulating marijuana or trade with Cuba). An editorial today appears to side with Mayor de Blasio in opposing state inspections of the city's homeless shelters: "Mr. de Blasio said the governor's vindictiveness had even extended earlier in the year to surprise state inspections of city homeless shelters."

"Even"! Given that the Times devoted vast space and editorial resources less than two years ago to the plight of Dasani, an 11 year old who lived in a fetid city homeless shelter in Brooklyn, the idea that the Times would now be siding with the mayor against the governor's efforts to exercise oversight in this area is astonishing.

In this day and age, there's just no excuse for publishing a news article about an appellate court decision without including a hyperlink to the opinion. Yet the Times did exactly that in an article that runs under the headline "Ruling That Apple Led E-Book Pricing Conspiracy Is Upheld." The Times reports:

By a 2-to-1 vote, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said it agreed with the conclusions of Judge Denise L. Cote of United States District Court in Manhattan, who rendered the decision in 2013.

In yet another show of lameness, the Times article doesn't name the appellate court judges, or give any explanation of the reasoning of the dissenter. For the record, the two judges who affirmed Judge Cote were Debra Ann Livingston and Raymond Lohier, and the one judge who saw it the way I would have seen it was Dennis Jacobs, who wrote, "Apple's conduct, assessed under the rule of reason on the horizontal plane of retail competition, was unambiguously and overwhelmingly procompetitive. Apple was a major potential competitor in a market dominated by a 90 percent monopoly....Amazon's 90 percent market share constituted a monopoly under antitrust law." The dissent also includes a sharp criticism of the court-appointed monitor, Michael Bromwich:

It would take strong stuff for a lawyer to transcend the worldly incentives of this injunction: unlimited work at the (now cut) rate of $1,000 an hour, paid by a solvent party that may expect retaliation for protesting, in order to perform a monitorship subject to extension by the court for reasons that will be influenced by input from the monitor himself. An injunction that thus blurs the lines of the adversary system does no good for the reputation of the courts.

Again, none of this newsworthy stuff is in the Times article.

Update: Just for comparison's sake, check out how the Wall Street Journal covered it. That paper did a better job, naming all three judges, linking to the opinion, and quoting from Judge Jacobs' dissent and explaining his reasoning.

A Times news article about the decision by Congress not to renew the charter of the Export-Import Bank includes the following passages:

For the longer term, advocates of the bank in both parties believe that by the end of July they can foil the antigovernment Republicans in Congress who blocked the bank's reauthorization and pull off a legislative Lazarus act restoring the agency's full powers for up to five years...

"We did it!" the antibank conservatives at the antigovernment advocacy group Heritage Action for America exulted in an email hours before the midnight deadline for the bank charter. [Emphasis added.]

It's just plain inaccurate for the Times to call these Republicans, or the Heritage Foundation, "antigovernment." They are the same ones who in many instances want to increase spending on the Defense Department and on immigration enforcement at the border. In many cases, they favor increased government regulation of abortion, and they oppose decreased government control of illegal drugs. It would be just as inaccurate for the Times to start calling Barney Frank or Bernie Sanders "antigovernment" because they favor less government regulation of abortion, immigration, and marijuana.

It's as if the Times doesn't understand that there's a difference between Republicans, or conservatives, and anarchists. Or as if the newspaper doesn't comprehend that being against big government, or being against some wasteful or unnecessary government programs, is not the same thing as being against all government.

If Democrats or liberals want to criticize Republicans as "antigovernment" and the Times wants to quote them doing so that would be one thing. But in this case, that isn't what is happening. Instead, the Times news reporter is, on her own, hurling inaccurate adjectives at politicians and advocacy groups. It's pretty egregious.

"Is Greater Focus on the Superrich Right for the Times?" headline, "Public Editor's Journal," June 25, 2015.

"Finding the Right Fit for Flying Private," headline, Times business section, June 26, 2015 (over an article about whether chartering, a jet card, or fractional ownership is the best alternative).

"The McLaren 650S Spider Is a $280,000 Thrill Ride," headline, Times auto review, June 26, 2015.

Looks to me as though the question has been asked and answered. I wonder how much of the bitterness about income and wealth inequality in America results from junior professors or adjunct faculty who get the Times on an educational discount and are exposed to this sort of coverage. Certainly the vast majority of Times readers can't afford either the $280,000 car or the fractional jet share.

From Times public editor Margaret Sullivan's Sunday column, about books by New York Times journalists, comes this gem from New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal: "It's tricky. Books are inherently a commercial enterprise."

That made me laugh for two reasons. First, books are not inherently a commercial enterprise. There are plenty of non-profit publishers, including Encounter Books, the Jewish Publication Society, Beacon Press, Nation Books, and just about every university press, including Harvard University Press (publishers of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century) and Yale University Press. And even at for-profit publishers, plenty of editors are motivated not only by a desire for profit but also by other desires, such as literary excellence.

Second, Mr. Rosenthal works for the New York Times, which at least ostensibly is itself a commercial enterprise. So do the reporters whose books and their commercial ambitions are supposedly so dangerous. Mr. Rosenthal seems to take for granted the notion that commercial motives are stronger in book publishing than in newspaper publishing, a notion that seems less than obvious to me.

My print edition of the Times carried a front page news article about the end of the hunt for two men who had escaped from a maximum security prison in upstate New York. It included this sentence: "They found shelter in empty hunting cabins, but left telltale clues of their presence that helped a vast array of agencies — from the State Police to the United States Marshals to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to state Forest Rangers — hone in on them over the last week."

That sent me to the Times archives in search of a May 25, 1980 "On Language" column by William Safire, who wrote, "The phrase 'to hone in on' is a mistake. The confusion is based on 'to home in,' or 'to home in on' ..."

According to the website Newsdiffs.org, sometime between 9:17 pm and 10:50 pm some astute Timesman or Timeswoman caught the mistake and fixed it by changing the 'n" in "hone" to an "m" in "home."

One way the Times reveals its biases is with the political labels it applies to others. One recent Times story referred to Judge Robert Bork as "an ultraconservative." Wouldn't it have been sufficient simply to describe him as conservative? Then a Times news article by David Sanger, who actually has been providing some strong and appropriately skeptical coverage of the negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, referred to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy as "a conservative think tank." That erroneous description was deleted in later versions of the story, according to the website newsdiffs.org, which tracks such changes. At least they didn't call the Washington Institute "ultraconservative." David Bernstein points out that the description "ultraliberal" appears rarely, if ever, in Times news copy outside quotation marks.