A full-column length Times editorial by Philip Boffey presses the case the Times has been making in favor of legalizing marijuana. It includes this passage:

Marijuana's negative health effects are arguments for the same strong regulation that has been effective in curbing abuse of legal substances. Science and government have learned a great deal, for example, about how to keep alcohol out of the hands of minors. Mandatory underage drinking laws and effective marketing campaigns have reduced underage alcohol use to 24.8 percent in 2011, compared with 33.4 percent in 1991.

Click through the link to the CDC data provided by the Times, and you will see the following disclaimer, which the Times doesn't pass along to its print readers: "Due to survey design modifications, comparison of results from before 1999 to 1999–2001 and 2002–2011 need to be made with caution."

Moreover, while the government may have made some limited progress in keeping alcohol out of the hands of minors, it is hardly an example of "effective" regulation. A 2009 Times editorial reported "the amount of binge drinking — downing five or more drinks in a row — remains high at colleges." And extensive Times news coverage of rape on college campus makes clear that alcohol abuse is often involved. The CDC reports "1 in 5 teen drivers involved in fatal crashes had some alcohol in their system in 2010."

A front-page dispatch from "Near the Israel-Gaza Border" reports:

Israeli political and military leaders mention the tunnel threat nearly every time they speak, and have gained widespread international support for eliminating them. The military in recent days has distributed photographs of tunnels that troops uncovered, and videos of them placing explosives inside and blowing some up. As part of the propaganda push, the military has also invited a few journalists underground for a tour.

My Webster's Second unabridged has as a definition of propaganda, "any systematic, widespread, deliberate indoctrination or plan for such indoctrination: now often used in a derogatory sense, connoting deception or distortion."

That "derogatory sense" and connotation of deception and distortion make "propaganda" the wrong word to use in this spot of the article. The word Israelis use for this sort of thing, and the word the reporter was probably looking for, is "hasbara," or "explanation." It's not as if Israel dug the tunnels as a deception, falsely to portray Hamas as terrorists. It may be public relations to highlight the tunnels, but propaganda isn't the right word.

The word also cropped up in cutlines for another front-page Jodi Rudoren article, which referred to "an anti-Palestinian propaganda video uploaded by the Israel Defense Forces," and also to "an anti-Israel propaganda video by Hamas."

The Times runs a 1,079 word news article in the business section about hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin filing for a divorce. The length of the article strikes me as excessive. Businessmen and other news-making individuals get divorced all the time. When Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. got separated from his wife, the Times ran a 161-word squib.

The Times headline over the Griffin article is "A Divorce That Thrusts Ken Griffin and Anne Dias Griffin Into the Spotlight," but that is disingenuous. The Times is the spotlight operator. It's not the divorce thrusting the Griffins into the spotlight, but the Times editor who decided to cover the issue at a length of 1,079 words.

A Times editorial about the war in Israel and Gaza says, "The war is terrorizing innocent people on both sides of the border, fomenting more hatred, creating an ever larger appetite for vengeance and ensuring that the cycle of violence will be repeated, if not right away then surely at some point in the future."

On the phrase "cycle of violence," The Times editorialists should read their own late columnist, William Safire.

Here he is, from March of 2002: "By denouncing Israel's defense as part of a 'cycle of violence,' Arab sympathizers treat this latest Arab aggression and Israeli defense as morally the same. But this terror war is but a battle in the same war that has been waged against Israel for 50 years."

And here he is in another column from that same month: "Reject all 'cycle of violence' moral relativism: only the Palestinian side is targeting civilians."

The Times editorialists may claim that the phrase may not have been appropriate in 2002, but it is appropriate now, a dozen years later. Somehow I think Mr. Safire would doubt it; if anything, the Israelis have an even stronger case now than they did then, because in the intervening period the Israelis unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, and Hamas, a more extreme terrorist group than the PLO, took over the territory.

The Times editorial faults Israel for striking U.N. schools and hospitals in Gaza without faulting Hamas for using such facilities to hide weapons and tunnels designed to attack Israel.

Jeffrey Goldberg writes at the Atlantic:

I was struck, over the weekend, by the lack of coverage of the Syrian civil war, in which the death count recently passed 170,000. By Sunday night, it had become clear that the weekend in toll in Syria would stand at roughly 700 dead—a larger number, obviously, than the weekend toll in Gaza (and more than the total number of deaths in this latest iteration of the Gaza war to date.) I tweeted the following in response to this news out of Syria: "I sincerely hope the @nytimes covers the slaughter in Syria – 700 dead in 48 hours – in tomorrow's paper. Very important story as well."

This was my sincere hope, and it was to my sincere surprise that Monday's newspaper contained no information whatsoever about the weekend slaughter in Syria. The front page was devoted mainly to Gaza and Ukraine. But there was nothing inside either, and nothing on the website. As far as I can tell, the Times, as of this writing, has not addressed this most recent round of Syria carnage in an even semi-comprehensive way. It goes without saying that continuing violence in Libya, Egypt, Nigeria, Yemen, and so on, has not received much attention from the Times in recent days.

Today's Times has a follow-up article to last week's investigation of a sexual assault case at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. At the Manhattan Institute's Minding the Campus blog, KC Johnson has some criticism of the Times coverage.

At the blog of the Empire Center, E.J. McMahon has a useful debunking of a Times article that claims "Wealthier New Yorkers Aren't Fleeing the City For Tax Havens." He calls that "a real stretch."

Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson calls New York Times columnist Paul Krugman a liar.

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Noah Pollak has another critique of the Times coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict. It is headlined, "All The News Hamas Sees Fit To Print."

Frustration and anger are building within the American Jewish community and the broader pro-Israel community at the New York Times coverage of the conflict in Israel and Gaza. Some examples:

• The New York Jewish Week's editor Gary Rosenblatt's column: "I've long been a defender of The New York Times' Mideast coverage, arguing that for all of its flaws on occasion, there is no consistent, inherent bias against Israel. But I'm having second thoughts these days, based on the coverage of the latest round of fighting between Israel and Hamas."
• The Weekly Standard, a piece by Irwin Stelzer headlined: "For New York Paper, Another Misleading Israel Article."
• "Goodbye, New York Times," an article by Helen Maryles Shankman in the Jewish Standard of New Jersey and Rockland.
• "The New York Times' Editorial on Israel Was a Sloppy Hack Job," an article by Yishai Schwartz in the New Republic.

A front-page news article about a potential merger between the Lorillard and Reynolds American cigarette companies reports, "Antitrust regulators in Washington are certain to scrutinize a deal that would effectively leave cigarette sales — and pricing — in the hands of a duopoly."

That's inaccurate. Cigarette pricing wouldn't be in the hands of a duopoly. It would be in the same hands it is in now — the hands of the government, which imposes a federal tax of $1.01 for a pack of 20 small cigarettes, $2.11 for a pack of 20 large cigarettes, along with state and local taxes that in New York City reach a combined $5.85 a pack. With taxes totaling $6, $7, or $8 a pack, claiming that pricing is in the hands of the cigarette companies is nonsense.

In the midst of a Times "deal professor" column by Steven Davidoff Solomon about how electronic cigarettes are supposedly inspiring the Lorillard-Reynold American merger, comes this:

people are already predicting that sales of e-cigarettes will surpass those of regular cigarettes — well, by 2047, according to one analysis by Bloomberg Industries.
By 2047, many of us could also be underwater because of global warming, assuming we are alive.

Here we thought we were in the middle of an article about a tobacco business deal, not sea level rises linked to climate change. The Times itself reported in 2012 that "One estimate that communities are starting to use for planning purposes suggests the ocean could rise a foot over the next 40 years, though that calculation is not universally accepted among climate scientists." That same 2012 front-page Times report said "about 3.7 million Americans," or less than 2 percent of the population, live within a few feet of high tide and would be at risk from such a rise.

Anyway, if the Times is going to inject this kind of fatalistic note into its reporting on the tobacco merger, why not include a sentence or two about global warming in every news article. "The Yankees won last night, but who cares because by 2047 we may all be underwater." "Efforts intensified to reach a cease-fire in the Middle East, but by the time a peace deal is fully implemented we may all be underwater."

A Times article quotes "Thane Rosenbaum, a law professor at Fordham University and a widely published author on legal ethics."

Mr. Rosenbaum did used to teach at Fordham, but the center he directs has moved to NYU School of Law, where Mr. Rosenbaum is now a senior fellow. If the Times is going to identify him as being associated with a law school, it might take the trouble to get the correct one.

David Brooks concludes his column with this sentence:

Or, as Albert Einstein put it, "You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."

I challenge Mr. Brooks to cite the original source of Einstein saying this in the words that are in the quotation marks. I think it is a bogus quote. Einstein may have said similar things, but I don't think he ever wrote or said the words that Brooks quotes him as saying. If Mr. Brooks can come up with a proper citation, giving the time, place, and source for Einstein saying this, I will happily apologize, but until he does, I think he has fallen for a phony Einstein quote.

Israel's ambassador to America, Ron Dermer, has an article up at Buzzfeed under the headline "5 Reasons Why New York Times Editorial Today Is an Embarrassment to Journalism."

Maybe he was emboldened by the Walmart approach, the thinking behind which is detailed further in a PR Week article here.