A Times news article about the decision by Brandeis University to withdraw an offer of an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali refers on second reference to the president of Brandeis, Fred Lawrence, as "Dr. Lawrence." Mr. Lawrence is a lawyer and has a J.D. degree, but the Times reserves the automatic "Dr." honorific for medical doctors and dentists. "Anyone else with an earned doctorate, like a Ph.D. degree, may request the title," the Times stylebook says. If the paper is going to let J.D.'s request to be called doctor, it seems like a pretty low bar and runs counter to common usage. And if the paper is calling President Lawrence "Dr. Lawrence" without his requesting it, it's misleading, because it suggests he requested it when he did not.

Today's New York Times features both a front-page news article and an op-ed page opinion piece about the threat posed by greedy, unlicensed tax preparers. Here's a quiz to see if you can tell the difference between the news article and the opinion piece:

Web headline: "Tax Preparers Targeting the Poor With High Fees"

That was the news article.

Passage from the text:

For millions of low-income Americans, tax season means the biggest one-time influx of money all year. It also means the annual sprouting of commercial tax preparers: some of them big-name franchises, some mom-and-pops and some, as 20-year-old Brittany Dixon discovered this year, shockingly expensive.

That was from the news article, too.

Another passage from the text:

with almost no regulation in the tax preparation industry and a tax code that is forbiddingly complex, the billions flowing into low-income households this time of year, primarily in the form of the earned-income tax credit, present a ripe target for the unscrupulous.

That was from the news article, too, probably because there's "almost no regulation" in the newspaper industry.

Another passage from the text:

Cedrick R., 57, who did not want to give his full name because he was embarrassed about his predicament, learned from a volunteer in Mr. Black's organization this year that his preparer, who worked out of a strip mall near Tuscaloosa, Ala., had been claiming a full-time college credit on his returns, inflating his refund and taking half for herself.

That's from the news article, too, and a good one for the Times public editor's anony-watch feature. Maybe he did not want to give his full name not only because he was embarrassed but also because he didn't want to attract the attention of the IRS.

Another passage from the text:

Of the 142 million individual income tax returns filed in 2011, 79 million were completed by paid preparers, and a majority of those, 42 million, were filled out by preparers who were neither licensed nor regulated.

That was from the opinion article, which was almost certainly edited by an unlicensed and unregulated Times opinion editor.

Another passage from the text:

With few barriers to entry, the field of tax preparation has drawn unscrupulous players. Many of them target low-income families who claim the earned-income tax credit, the nation's single biggest antipoverty program.

That was from the opinion article. Note the use of the word "unscrupulous," same as in the news article. Note also the hyperlink to the Times news article, which is pretty neat for an article published the same day as the Times opinion piece.

More from the text:

On Tuesday, the Senate Finance Committee will hold a hearing on the issue, which Senator Ron Wyden described as a priority for him as committee chairman.

That was from the news article.

And more:

The new chairman of the Senate's tax-writing committee, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, and the committee's top Republican, Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, are holding a hearing today on protecting taxpayers from "incompetent and unethical" preparers.

That was from the opinion article.

From a Dealbook article that runs under the headline "Former Kaplan Chief Assembling a Digital Learning Company":

(Kaplan is now part of Graham Industries, which changed its name last year from The Washington Post Company after it sold The Washington Post newspaper.)

The new name of the Washington Post-less Washington Post Company is not Graham Industries (which sells parts for steam engines) but Graham Holdings.

It's kind of a lame article anyway — the only person quoted in it by name is the former Kaplan chief, Jonathan Grayer. There's no response from Kaplan and no assessment from independent observers of Mr. Grayer's plans.

From a dispatch from Paris about Marine Le Pen, "the charismatic and complicated leader of the National Front, the largest far-right party in France.":

As the rally in Perpignan ended, people thronged to the stage to greet Ms. Le Pen in person.

Matthieu, 25, an unemployed man wearing black jeans and a black jacket who declined to give his last name, looked at Ms. Le Pen admiringly as she held a baby in one arm.

"She's still so sincere — she's a person of conviction," he said. "We need to go back and revive national patriotism a bit."

If this guy "declined to give his last name," maybe the Times could have declined to quote him. He has no particular expertise or specialized knowledge. If the point is to just get colorful quotes from random Le Pen followers, a little more persistence or patience by the Times reporter might have paid off by finding one of them who was willing to give his or her full first and last name.

If you like the work we are doing at Smartertimes, please consider supporting the site financially by becoming a paying subscriber. Your membership will help to sustain the site's operations and growth. Thanks to those of you who have already pitched in without being asked. The link is here.

A Times business section article runs under the headline "Senate Report Says Caterpillar Used Swiss Subsidiary To Reduce Taxes." It begins:

Caterpillar, the big American maker of heavy construction and mining equipment, used a subsidiary in Switzerland to avoid paying $2.4 billion of income taxes over 13 years, according to a Senate investigative report released on Monday.

No mention at all in the Times article of the company's ties during that period with President Obama. As FutureOfCapitalism reported back in 2011:

If one had to name a company that was one of President Obama's favorites, Caterpillar would have to be high on the list. On February 6, 2009, Mr. Obama named the company's chairman and CEO, Jim Owens, to his Economic Recovery Advisory Board. On February 12, 2009, Mr. Obama flew with Mr. Owens aboard Air Force One to Caterpillar's headquarters to tout the stimulus bill. On November 24, 2009, Mr. Owens and his wife were invited guests at Mr. Obama's first state dinner at the White House, in honor of Prime Minister Singh of India. On February 7, 2011, Mr. Obama praised the company, which is based in the president's home state of Illinois, in a speech to the Chamber of Commerce.

The New York Times Public Editor, Margaret Sullivan, links to and quotes Smartertimes in the second edition of her AnonyWatch column cracking down on the use of anonymous sources in the New York Times. You can read her column here.

Maybe the Times Thursday Styles section should be renamed the Michelle Obama section. Today's contains not one, not two, but three articles mentioning the first lady. Some might consider it overkill.

The main cover story about a businessman who invested in a move called "Fed Up" reports, "Michelle Obama, a noted advocate for better eating habits, declined to participate." This is an example of finding a way to insert Michelle Obama into an article even when she has nothing to do with the article.

Then there is a fashion article that reports in its opening paragraph, "Lane Bryant, the plus-size retailer, was presenting a collection designed by Isabel Toledo, a designer probably best known for the lemon-grass wool lace dress and matching coat Michelle Obama wore on the cold morning of the 2009 inauguration."

Then there is a column about the clothes Mrs. Obama wore on her trip to China. That article is a great example of how the Times outsources its standards on anonymous sources to other publications. The Times reports:

A former aide told The New Republic: "The first lady having the wrong pencil skirt" is as big a misstep (the term used was a less-publishable one) as "a policy initiative that completely failed."

Does the Times even know who this anonymous former aide is, or is it just taking the New Republic's word for it?

Nate Silver's website FiveThirtyEight.com has a pretty funny analysis about how Paul Krugman's view of FiveThirtyEight has changed substantially in a negative direction since FiveThirtyEight left the New York Times.

"Festival Focus Is on Quality, Not Diversity," is the headline over a Times article about a film festival in New York. It reports:

These days, the programmers — Jytte Jensen, Dennis Lim, Marian Masone, Gavin Smith, Rajendra Roy and Joshua Siegel — are selecting titles that may not be to all tastes (a good thing) and that don't seem to have been primarily chosen for some mechanistic criteria, like national diversity. Here, the work is the thing.

It's a strange headline in that it suggests that quality and diversity are somehow conflicting goals rather than mutually reinforcing ones.

An auto review in Sunday's Times (of a $238,180 Bentley Flying Spur) features the reviewer writing about driving the car in a snowstorm "the night after Christmas." If the Times is letting the copy age for three months before publishing, you'd think they'd be embarrassed enough about it to edit some of these dated time references away. What good does this do the guy who would have bought the Bentley back in January or February but was stuck with an inferior vehicle for two months until the Times saw fit to allow the review to see the light of day. Strange.

A front-page Sunday Times article about the political prospects of Rand Paul, the Republican from Kentucky, includes this: "Nate Morris, a wunderkind fund-raiser for President George W. Bush in 2004, has linked Mr. Paul to such figures as the billionaire investor Herb Allen."

Could there be a more vague verb there than "linked"? Did Warren Buffett's pal Herb Allen donate to Rand Paul's campaign or political action committee? If so, how much? If there has been such a donation, it isn't yet disclosed in the Federal Election Commission's online database. The Times article carries no comment from Mr. Allen, nor any indication that there was an attempt to reach him for comment. For all we know, the Times may be getting Herb Allen mixed up with Paul Allen, or with Harold Allen of Mexican Manufacturers, Inc., in El Paso, Texas. Was there a meeting between Herb Allen and Rand Paul, arranged by Mr. Morris? Again, Times readers can't know from the sentence. Some more clarity would be appreciated by this reader.

Here is a Texas Tribune dispatch with which the New York Times covers, with an article in the March 23 paper, the news that the chancellor of the University of Texas announced back on February 10 that he is resigning:

An email in February by Paul Foster, the chairman of the board, indicated that this and other disagreements could have caused some regents to sour on the chancellor. (U.T.-Austin is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune. Mr. Foster is a major donor to The Tribune.)...But of the chancellor, Mr. Huffines said: "I think he deserves credit for pushing through the turmoil. He exceeded my expectations, and I set the bar pretty high." (Mr. Huffines is president of PlainsCapital Bank, which has been a corporate sponsor of The Tribune.)

Asked if he would have done anything differently in the last five years, Dr. Cigarroa could come up with only one thing. In 2012, security concerns prompted him to initially cancel a high-profile boxing match at the University of Texas at El Paso, prompting backlash from local politicians and community leaders. (U.T.-El Paso is a corporate sponsor of The Tribune.)

I'm all for transparency and disclosure, but at a certain point it becomes ridiculous. Never mind the basic question of why this guy's resignation is even news six weeks after it happened. It's not that long a news article, and nearly five percent of it is devoted to parenthetical disclosures about who is or isn't a sponsor or donor to the Tribune. If they're going to disclose who is a sponsor of the Tribune, should they also have to disclose the people who aren't sponsors, or who were hit up for money but said no? The article begins with the shocking news that the outgoing chancellor's mother "was not surprised" when her son announced he would step down. Why should Times readers care what the guy's mother thinks?

These disclosures are a regular feature of Texas Tribune coverage that appears in the Times. An article the other day about trying to make Texas cities more walkable included these passages:

Walkable communities offer more mobility for seniors no longer willing or able to drive, and many empty nesters now want to live closer to everyday amenities, said Tim Morstad, an official with AARP Texas, which has worked to make Texas communities more accessible to older pedestrians. (AARP is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.)...In Harris County, which includes Houston, traffic and demographic changes have helped propel a shift in housing preferences, said Stephen L. Klineberg, a director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. (Rice is a corporate sponsor of the Tribune.)..."There's a struggle between the collective vision for the city and individual rights and desires that seems to be very pervasive in Texas," said Dean Almy, the director of the urban design graduate program at the University of Texas at Austin (a corporate sponsor of the Tribune).

Another short article, much of which is devoted to cumbersome explanation that three of the people quoted in it work for sponsors of the Tribune. If the Times is going to insist on this disclosure, it might as well go all the way, by explaining exactly how much money each "corporate sponsor" or "major donor" has given, and how far removed the person being quoted is from the decision on the sponsorship. Otherwise, the whole matter is probably best handled with some sort of general boilerplate at the end of each Texas Tribune article explaining that the article is provided by a nonprofit that accepts money from the institutions and people it covers, and that the full list of those donors is available at some hyperlinked annual report. Otherwise the whole thing seems less like disclosure and more like advertising.

The whole thing is a reminder that the copy provided to the Times at low rates by the non-profits often doesn't meet the paper's usual standards.

An editorial in today's Times says:

If Mr. Boehner really wants to crack down on cheating, he might look to the carried-interest tax loophole, which allows hedge fund managers to mischaracterize their income as capital gains and costs the Treasury $11 billion a year — far more than extra dollars for food stamps.

The Times source for the "$11 billion a year" number is a Times op-ed that, when it appeared, Smartertimes pointed out was inaccurate, but the Times did not correct. As I wrote when the op-ed appeared:

A recent Huffington Post article cited Treasury Department estimates on the tax change at $1.3 billion in in 2013, and "about $13.5 billion over the next decade." The news columns of the Times itself reported last month that "Changes to the treatment of carried interest could bring in $17 billion over 10 years, according to Congressional estimates." It looks like Ms. Forester de Rothschild is mixing up ten year estimates with annual estimates. In other words, she's off by a factor of about ten.

Citizens for Tax Justice, a left-wing group, puts the ten-year revenue impact of changing treatment of carried interest at $21 billion. The Times news columns in October of 2013 said the change "would raise an estimated $16 billion extra over a decade."

Why the Times editorialists are sticking with the "$11 billion a year" figure in the face of a pile of evidence from their own paper and elsewhere that the number is wrong is a mystery. A cynic might suggest they are trying to inflate it into a bigger issue than it really is.

The sentence from today's Times editorial is also misleading because it suggests the tax treatment applies only to "hedge fund managers" when in fact it applies also to venture capital, private equity, real estate, oil and gas — any investment partnership with long-term capital gains.

A Times news article from Chicago begins:

With the selection of a multimillionaire businessman to be the Republican candidate for governor in Illinois, union leaders have begun bracing for one of their starkest campaign battles of the year over the fate of public sector labor unions, pensions and pay.

The same article mentions President Obama but doesn't call him a multimillionaire, even though he is one. And the Times writes about Mayor de Blasio all the time without calling him a multimillionaire, even though he reportedly owns "a pair of two-family homes on 11th Street in Park Slope that are valued at more than $1.1 million apiece."

The first quote in the Times article comes not from the Republican candidate but from a labor leader, Roberta Lynch of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The Times writes about her without saying how much money she has or makes, even though that information is readily available from the U.S. Department of Labor website and indicates she earned $140,834 from the state union in 2013. The judgment seems to be that a person's personal wealth is worth mentioning prominently in the news article so long as the person is a Republican politician.