At Commentary, Martin Kramer has a characteristically excellent post faulting the Times formulation, in respect of Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi, that "critics have accused the professor of having had ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization, which he has denied." As Professor Kramer points out, numerous reporters — not "critics" — including those of the Times itself have described Khalidi as working for the PLO.

A Times editorial makes the case for increasing the federal minimum wage because it would be good for business. The Times writes:

These clear benefits might help explain why Gap, the apparel chain, said last week that it would raise the minimum pay of its hourly employees to $9 an hour in 2014 and to $10 next year, which will benefit 65,000 of its 90,000 workers. The company's chairman and chief executive, Glenn Murphy, said the move would "directly support our business, and is one that we expect to deliver a return many times over."Some retailers pay their workers even more. Costco, one of the most successful retailers in the country, has a starting wage of $11.50 per hour for most entry-level jobs, and its average wage for hourly workers is $21 an hour. Patrick Callans, a senior vice president for the company, said that Costco's higher pay and benefits "allows us to attract and retain great employees."

But if businesses are raising wages on their own, why is a federal minimum wage increase necessary to force them to do what they are doing already? As Richard Epstein put it the other day, "these considerations cut exactly the opposite way. If increased wages alone increased productivity, there would be no need for federal intervention: Employers would have all the incentive they need to raise wages voluntarily. That is how markets work."

Meanwhile, if the Times is so confident that higher pay is the secret to business success, it might try the practice out on its own business before imposing it, by force of law, on the rest of the country. Just this week, a Times article about writer Michael Gross's apartment reported that Mr. Gross quit The New York Times in the late 1980s "for a better-paying job at New York magazine." Seth Mnookin's 2004 book Hard News spoke of "relatively modest pay" as part of "the implicit contract the Times has always had with its reporters and editors." And that's the skilled — supposedly, at least — labor.

The unskilled part, like actually delivering the paper, the Times contracts out to Publishers Circulation Fulfillment, which in turn contracts the job out itself to individual contractors, whose reviews at Glassdoor.com refer to "below average pay" and "per diem earnings" of $10.60 and report that the delivery company charges the contractors for the plastic bags and for the use of a work area in which to bag the newspapers. The reviews at Indeed.com include one that says "the pay was a joke." Granted, these are anonymous reviews, but if the Times really believes what it says in its editorial about how businesses can deal with a minimum wage increase by "by modestly increasing prices and by giving smaller increases to higher-paid employees," then it ought to practice what it preaches by turning all those newspaper delivery drivers into paid New York Times employees with full benefits and union wages. It could pay for it by "modestly increasing" advertising and home-delivery prices, and by "giving smaller increases" to top Times executives. Think of all the business benefits to the Times, right?

What a bunch of phonies.

"To Pay For Infrastructure Repairs, Obama Seeks Tax Changes" is the headline over a Times news article. The euphemistic language of the headline echoes that of the article itself, which reports:

The president's proposal, which he first suggested in a speech last summer in Chattanooga, Tenn., would eliminate business and corporate tax loopholes to finance a four-year, $302 billion transportation bill. White House officials declined to be specific, but said they would try to eliminate incentives for companies to ship jobs overseas....

White House officials said Mr. Obama's plan would use savings from business tax changes for a one-time, $150 billion infusion of cash into the trust fund to make it solvent.

The Times may describe it as "savings from business tax changes" or an effort to "eliminate business and corporate tax loopholes," but the effect is of a $150 billion or $300 billion tax increase or tax hike on American businesses. Why the Times can't bring itself to state this straightforwardly in the news article or headline, and chooses instead to speak of "changes" rather than increases, is a mystery. A cynic might suspect that the newspaper is trying to help Mr. Obama get the tax increase through. Funny how Republican efforts to reduce the growth of the food stamp program never get described as "changes" or loophole eliminations, but are described instead as cuts.

The online New York Times opinion has a "room for debate" feature that might more accurately be labeled "no room for debate." The latest example asks "How can the West help bring about democracy in Ukraine without antagonizing Russia?" Leave aside the questionable Times idea that antagonizing Russia ought to be, or can be, avoided. The Times provides responses from four authors. Three more or less call on the U.S. to work with Russia. The one dissident, Richard Grenell, gets hammered by the Times hard-left commenters.

"Perhaps" is one of the words that as an editor or as an alert reader always makes me pay close attention to what comes next. A dispatch from San Francisco in today's Times reports, "Perhaps nowhere in America is the debate over income inequality being carried out as fiercely as in San Francisco, where the technology industry's success has led to a roaring economy, social disruption and widespread protests."

Perhaps. Or perhaps it's being carried out just as fiercely (if one-sidedly), in the newsroom of the New York Times, which is crusading on the topic; in New York City, where a mayor was recently elected on the issue, or in Washington, D.C., where President Obama has called it the defining issue of our time. Why reach for the superlative, which the "perhaps" concedes is just hype? The article could have just said, "The debate over income inequality is raging in San Francisco, where the technology industry's success has led to a roaring economy, social disruption and widespread protests."

A Times news article begins: "Gary Melius, a well-known Long Island developer and prominent political patron, was shot in the head by a masked gunman on Monday afternoon in the parking lot of his opulent Gold Coast estate in Suffolk County, the police said."

If the guy is so well-known and prominent, why does the Times need to remind us of that? By saying so, the paper is signaling that he wasn't. They don't say, "Barack Obama, a well-known and prominent Washington politician" or "Jill Abramson, a well-known and prominent editor." It's just hype.

Also, isn't "opulent Gold Coast estate" redundant? Are there non-opulent Gold Coast estates?

The New York Times waddled in recently on two stories that were already extensively reported in other publications. It more or less replicated the reporting and then re-issued the articles to Times readers, without letting Times readers in on the fact that they were consuming five-month-old news.

Our first example is today's front-page New York Times article by Jennifer Steinhauer and Jonathan Weisman about the Heritage Foundation's supposed turn away from rigorous scholarship and toward political activism (funny how the Times wasn't exactly celebrating Heritage's rigorous scholarship during the decades before it was supposedly destroyed).

The Times reports that "In recent months, some of the group's most prominent scholars have left."

The Times quotes Mickey Edwards, a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation and a Republican former congressman: "DeMint has not only politicized Heritage, he's also trivialized it."

The Times reports on a flap over Heritage's position on the farm bill, and also reports, "Perhaps no event has been more indicative of the foundation's new relations with Congress than the decision by House Republicans last summer to kick Heritage Foundation analysts out of the weekly meeting of their Republican Study Committee. Heritage officials had been the only outsiders allowed in the meeting. But as Heritage Action became more aggressive, study committee members demanded to know why the people criticizing them in their districts were listening in on their strategizing in Washington. Mr. DeMint attributed the ouster to questions over ethics rules on providing food to lawmakers."

It's all ground that had been thoroughly plowed by Molly Ball back on September 25, 2013 in an article in the Atlantic. She had quoted Mickey Edwards:

Mickey Edwards, one of three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation when it began in 1973, was one of those disturbed by Heritage's turn, which, he told me, "makes it look like just another hack Tea Party kind of group."

A former eight-term Republican congressman from Oklahoma, Edwards now serves as vice president of the Aspen Institute. "They're destroying the reputation and credibility of the Heritage Foundation," he added. "I think the respect for their [policy] work has been greatly diminished as a result."

She had mentioned the staff exodus: "Numerous top staffers have left in recent years."

She had reported on the "blowup over the farm bill" and wrote that "Nothing better symbolizes Heritage's integration with Republican policymaking than its longtime partnership with the Republican Study Committee...Heritage sponsors the RSC's annual retreat, paying for members and their spouses to spend three days at a lavish hotel proximate to D.C. And House Republicans who belong to the RSC meet every Wednesday over lunch to talk policy, plot legislative strategy, and seek out cosponsors for legislation. Each member of Congress may bring only one staffer to the large conference room in the basement of the Capitol where the meetings are held. Outside groups are barred -- except Heritage. The foundation's lobbyists are a fixture at the meetings, which Heritage also has historically catered with sandwiches from Chick-fil-A. But this cozy relationship hit an abrupt snag last month. ...Heritage was abruptly banned from the RSC's meetings."

The second example is a Times article by Vivian Yee that ran under the headline "Montessori Schools Surge in Popularity Among New Generation of Jewish Parents." It quotes Ami Petter-Lipstein, Amanda Pogany, and Rivkah Schack. The New York Jewish Week's Julie Weiner wrote the same article back in Sepember of 2013, also quoting Ami Petter-Lipstein, Amanda Pogany, and Rivkah Schack. Again, the Times doesn't credit or mention the Jewish Week article.

A "Metropolitan Diary" item in today's paper sets off the B.S. detector of a number of readers. At least 12 Times commenters have upvoted a comment that says, "Often I feel that a Metropolitan Diary entry is more a short piece of 'Only in New York' fiction than it is truth. I think this is one of those exercises in creative writing, especially after noting the last name of the writer."

The Metropolitan Diary is a collection of anecdotes submitted by readers. The one at issue here involves a man who gave $200 to an "attractive" drama major with a hard-luck story, only to learn the next morning that it was an "exercise" concocted so that the woman could "understand what it was like to be Blanche DuBois and rely on the kindness of strangers." The person who submitted the anecdote gave the name Jerome Kowalski. Kowalski, of course, is the last name of some of the characters (Stanley, Stella) in the Tennessee Williams play "A Streetcar Named Desire" that also features a character named Blanche DuBois.

If the stories are fictional, the Times might want to label them as such. As it is, they are presented as being as true as the rest of the material in the newspaper.

An article/interview in the Times home section today includes the following passage:

I was awfully impressed with your sex-toy research. That chart detailing how to clean them is so comprehensive! Who knew sex toys came in so many materials? To whom did you turn for that?

I went to Babeland, which is a sex-toy store in my neighborhood. They took me through the store and showed me every toy and material and explained the care and cleaning of each one.

I will say that the idea of toys in stone and Pyrex made me raise an eyebrow.

Yes, the first seems cold and the second, well, I would worry about breakage.

Also, I felt the bong-cleaning section was very thorough.

The Times seems recently to have developed an editorial enthusiasm for sex toys. A few months ago an article bylined "the staff" on the blog of the New York Times Magazine featured a member of the Times magazine staff advising "I think all women should have at least one vibrator. That they use regularly."

And then there was Joyce Wadler's column from November that began: "I've been thinking about an extremely beautiful sex toy an old boyfriend got me...This toy, which was silver and shaped like a stylized banana, was so complicated I never used it." The column went on to discuss the "problem" of disposing of the device in an environmentally responsible manner.

The Wadler column was at least funny, but something about the tone of the other two articles seemed somehow off to me. And given that the newspaper has been offering buyouts to longtime staffers and eliminating some blogs and standalone sections in an effort to save money, it seems a bit odd that the paper has the resources to devote to such extensive coverage of this topic.

"Nobel Leader's Frank Advice to China's Leadership," is the headline over a Times news article about work that the Nobel laureate economist A. Michael Spence is doing on China. The article says:

Mr. Spence has become something of an expert on the Chinese economy after being invited by Beijing, along with Edwin Lim, a former chief World Bank representative in China, to put together an unaffiliated advisory group, supported by the Cairncross Economic Research Foundation. The group has met intensively with the Chinese government's key planning and economic officials and conducted what those officials have called an unprecedented study of China's development challenge.

How does the Times know that Professor Spence's advice is "frank"? I read the Times article and couldn't find any reference at all to Mr. Spence advising the Chinese government about political or religious freedom and democracy, or about allowing free labor unions the right to organize or strike.

It's almost never a good idea for a Jewish columnist to write a column about a story from the Christian Bible, and David Brooks proves that rule today with a column on the story of the prodigal sons. Mr. Brooks writes:

The father's lesson for us is that if you live in a society that is coming apart on class lines, the best remedies are oblique. They are projects that bring the elder and younger brothers together for some third goal: national service projects, infrastructure-building, strengthening a company or a congregation.

The idea seems to be that Jesus would somehow have been in favor of "infrastructure-building," i.e., President Obama's stimulus spending or high-speed rail. Mr. Brooks would have been better off skipping the Christian Bible and focusing on the Jewish Bible, which at times takes quite a skeptical view toward these sorts of projects, i.e., the Tower of Babel and the Egyptian pyramids and cities built by enslaved Israelites.

A Times editorial bemoans the use of adjunct and other non-tenure-track professors on college campuses: "the nature of the college work force has changed substantially, possibly to the detriment of educational quality....This increasing dependence on inexpensive adjuncts may be bad for students, as well. ...the new college campus, rife with adjuncts and administrators, does not seem geared to fulfill what is, after all, the major mission of universities: educating students."

The editorial is flawed in several ways. First, note the use of weasel words "possibly...may be...seem." The detrimental effect on education is speculative.

Second, the Times editorial fails to confront evidence that the end of tenure is good for students — a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by the president of Northwestern University comparing learning by two groups of students at Northwestern University— those taking classes with tenured or tenure-track professors, and those taking classes from non-tenure-line faculty. As the abstract put it: "We find consistent evidence that students learn relatively more from non-tenure line professors in their introductory courses." There's no mention of this research in the Times editorial.

Third, it's hypocritical of the Times to criticize colleges for doing what the Times itself does aplenty — use free lance labor without benefits. To use the specific example of the Times editorial page, not every opinion piece in the Times is written by a Times staff columnist with full-time salary and benefits. Many opinion pieces are written by free lance contributors who also have other jobs. These free lance contributors are less expensive. Maybe it would be better for readers if the Times hired more columnists instead of using free lance contributors, but maybe not. It's an analogous situation.

Fourth, if all these classes taught by non-tenure-track professors are so terrible for students, why are so many Times journalists complicit in the practice? The list of adjunct faculty at Columbia Journalism School includes New York Times staffers Walt Bogdanich and Joseph Nocera. David Brooks teaches at Yale.

Fifth, also absent from the Times editorial is any mention of soaring college tuition prices. If colleges can pay professors less, they might be able to charge students less, which might be a good thing.

Microsoft's Frank Shaw has sent a letter to the New York Times' new technology columnist, Farhad Manjoo, complaining about Mr. Manjoo's first Times column: "your predictions seem like you are using a rear-view mirror, not a windshield, to look at the road ahead."

On his blog at the Council on Foreign Relations, Elliott Abrams does a wonderful job of debunking a poll that the New York Times covered unskeptically the other day in an article by Rick Gladstone headlined "Majority of Americans Favor Trade With Cuba, Poll Finds."

The Times article described the organization that commissioned the poll, the Atlantic Council, as "a prominent Washington research organization." Mr. Abrams provides some information the Times did not: "the Atlantic Council has a strong position against the embargo on Cuba." Neither article discloses that the Atlantic Council is partially funded by foreign governments that include Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Qatar, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, information that came out during the process of confirming Secretary of Defense Hagel.

From the corrections column of today's Times:

An article on Feb. 5 about the expiration of a tax break for homeowners who received mortgage debt relief or went through a short sale, in which the house is sold for less than the mortgage balance, omitted an exception for some California homeowners. Because under state law borrowers are not personally liable for the unpaid balance on their loans in the event of a short sale, the Internal Revenue Service determined that homeowners in California would not have to count the difference as taxable income. The I.R.S. guidance applies only to California, and does not apply to principle reduction, which is taxable as income.

I think what the Times means here is "principal reduction," not "principle reduction." The only principle being reduced here is the one that says the editors in charge of the Times corrections column should use the English language with care.