A Tweeter points out that a Times news article about the Israeli company SodaStream and the actress Scarlett Johansson reports, "The dispute over the ad, scheduled to air during the Super Bowl on Sunday, has pitted pro-Palestinian activists against people and groups who support Israel unreservedly."

This is a strangely non-parallel way of framing the issue. Not pro-Palestinian activists versus pro-Israel activists. Not "people and groups who support Israel unreservedly" versus "people and groups who support Palestinians unreservedly." It's not even an accurate description, because some of the people most supportive of SodaStream were also critical of Israel, or at least did not unreservedly support it, when, under Prime Minister Rabin and Prime Minister Sharon, the Israeli government chose to cede land in the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Arabs.

Alex Witchel, writing in the Times about the re-opening of the renovated dining room at the Regency Hotel, says: "I'd heard about moguls ordering one piece of dry toast and an egg, paying, what, $30, $40? It's no revelation that rich people are crazy..."

Lower in the article, she writes:

Although Mr. Granoff usually arrived at 7:45 a.m., he reserved for 8:30, kindly assuming that was my idea of eating late. The night before, knowing that I needed to be up and out, I slept only in 15-minute increments. By 5 a.m., I couldn't sleep at all. When I made a pot of coffee, I forgot the filter, and it leaked everywhere. I couldn't find a cab. By the time I got to the Regency, I was a wreck.

If "rich people are crazy," the list of crazy rich people seems to include the members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family who assigned and ran this article by Ms. Witchel, who apparently finds making it to breakfast at the Regency by 8:30 a.m. to be a major challenge. Takes one to know one, apparently.

Is there any other category of people about which the Times would allow such a sweeping dismissal of their mental health?

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw catches Times columnist Paul Krugman making a claim about income inequality leading to higher mortality and worse health and finds that the claim is unsupported by the article that Professor Krugman links to as evidence.

The Times has now published its second article in two months (first, second) on the topic of women's pubic hair. (Via Twitter.)

Glad that 1,250-person newsroom staff is being used to its full capacity.

From the lead front-page news article in today's New York Times, about Russian missile tests that America says violate a treaty:

Such tests are prohibited by the treaty banning medium-range missiles that was signed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader at the time, and that has long been viewed as one of the bedrock accords that brought an end to the Cold War.

Note the use of the passive voice: "has long been viewed." Who is doing the viewing? The Times doesn't say, which is a way of inserting into the news article a highly contested and, in my view, groundless, opinion, which is that it was arms control treaties that "brought an end to the Cold War," rather than, say, the Reagan-era military buildup, or the collapse of Communism because of its own failures as an economic and political system, or the fall of the Soviet Union because of the opening of the Berlin Wall, the rise of Solidarity in Poland, and the decisions of the people behind the Iron Curtain that they would rather be free and elect their own governments.

Adam Liptak manages to write an entire New York Times column about the court case Hedges v. Obama without explaining that "Hedges" is Christopher Hedges, who spent 15 years as a reporter for the New York Times, and without mentioning that the other named plaintiffs in the case include Pentagon Papers figure Daniel Ellsberg and the radical professor Noam Chomsky.

The online version of Mr. Liptak's column includes a hyperlink to court documents that include that information, but print readers are out of luck, and the Times connection to the plaintiff in the case seems at least worth disclosing in a Times news article.

Paul Krugman's New York Times column is about a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal from Tom Perkins, a founding partner of venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers. From the letter:

Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent.

From the Krugman column (headline: Paranoia of the Plutocrats):

I also suspect that today's Masters of the Universe are insecure about the nature of their success. We're not talking captains of industry here, men who make stuff. We are, instead, talking about wheeler-dealers, men who push money around and get rich by skimming some off the top as it sloshes by. They may boast that they are job creators, the people who make the economy work, but are they really adding value? Many of us doubt it — and so, I suspect, do some of the wealthy themselves, a form of self-doubt that causes them to lash out even more furiously at their critics.

It's usually a good idea to avoid talking about Nazi Germany in connection with anything other than Nazi Germany. But the notion that Tom Perkins, of all people, was just a skimmer who didn't really add any value is just irresponsibly disconnected from the facts. His big deal was Genentech — this CBS report says Kleiner Perkins turned a $250,000 investment into $200 million. This is a company that cloned human insulin and human growth hormone. Ask a diabetic or anyone with a growth problem helped by the hormone if Tom Perkins added value. He was the first general manager of the Hewlett Packard company's computer division.

Not only is the accusation by Professor Krugman that Mr. Perkins just shuffled money around false, but, ironically enough, the distinction made by Professor Krugman between financial and non-financial capitalism has ugly historical precedents. From the FutureOfCapitalism review of the book Capitalism and the Jews:

It was Karl Marx, who was converted to Lutheranism as a child by his parents, who managed to combine the old blood libel against the Jews with an attack on capitalism. "Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks," Mr. Muller quotes Marx as saying in Capital. Mr. Muller goes on, "When Lenin later referred to the necessity of eliminating capitalists because they were 'bloodsuckers,' he was merely heightening Marx's own metaphor."

It is a short leap from this to the work of the Nazi economic theorist Gottfried Feder, who, Mr. Muller writes, "distinguished between Aryan and Jewish forms of capitalism, the former industrial and creative, the latter financial and parasitic."

Or to that of the anti-Semitic American automaker Henry Ford, who Mr. Muller quotes as writing that, "the Jew is a mere huckster, a trader who doesn't want to produce, but to make something out of what somebody else produces."

It's been interesting to see the Kleiner Perkins firm and various others scurry to distance themselves publicly from Mr. Perkins' remarks. I doubt anyone will distance himself from Professor Krugman's, which are troubling in their own way as well, both for the false accusation and for the false distinction.

A Times news article criticizing actress Scarlett Johansson's work for SodaStream reports:

In a promotional video about the making of the SodaStream commercial scheduled to air during the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, Ms. Johansson mentioned that she was particularly drawn to the product for ethical reasons — that it eliminates the need for plastic soda bottles, which contaminate the environment.

That's inaccurate in two ways. First, it inaccurately describes the claim made by Ms. Johansson in the video. She never says the SodaStreem eliminates the need for plastic soda bottles. Second, the product in fact does not eliminate the need for plastic soda bottles. There may be one version that has glass carafes, but by far the largest seller is the product that works with a re-usable plastic bottle.

The article's treatment of the Middle East policy issues is just as sloppy. It never mentions that the Israeli "settlement" where the SodaStream factory is is relatively close to Israel's capital, Jerusalem, and has bipartisan support in Israel. It is not some far-flung or unauthorized outpost. It doesn't question why Oxfam, an aid group, is choosing to get involved in the Arab-Israeli dispute, which is far from its mission. The article includes 18 paragraphs critical of SodaStream, Israel, or Johansson, and a mere 10 that are either neutral or positive. Is the Times news department's position that Jews should be forbidden to operate companies on this land, where Jews have lived for thousands of years and that the Bible says God gave to the Jews?

A Times news article reports President Obama's establishment of an administration task force to combat sexual assault on college campuses:

at a ceremony in the East Room, Mr. Obama signed a memorandum creating the task force, surrounded by senior advisers on his White House Council on Women and Girls. On Wednesday, that council released a rundown of past and prospective administration actions titled "Rape and Sexual Assault: A Renewed Call to Action." The issue is a priority of women's groups, which have been crucial to Mr. Obama's election victories.
Although episodes of sexual assaults in the military have received more attention recently, rape is most common on campuses, the report said. One in five students has been assaulted, it said, but just 12 percent of them report the violence.

Absent from the Times is any skepticism at all regarding this "one in five" statistic, skepticism of the sort that is available in this article from the Independent Women's Forum and this article by Heather Mac Donald in City Journal.

None of this is to suggest that rape, on campus or anywhere else, is anything less than a terrible crime, or that the government shouldn't work to prevent it, reduce it, and punish it, just that there's a newsworthy controversy about that statistic that the Times would have done better to cover than to ignore.

The Times finally waddles in today with a news article ("Comment by Cuomo Outrages Republicans") about Governor Cuomo's remark, made Friday, that "extreme conservatives" "have no place in the state of New York." The absence of any coverage had been noted earlier here. Absent from the Times is any explanation of why it took the paper nearly a week to get to the story. That might be a fertile topic for some internal inquiry there.

The "Room For Debate" online opinion section of the New York Times offers an example of the way the Times offers the appearance of a debate or a diversity of opinion rather than an actual debate. First, the Times frames the question: "Should regulators and lawmakers in the United States" place caps on bankers' bonuses similar to those in force in the European Union? The Times publishes responses from five sources. Two are professors at European universities. That doesn't take anything away from their arguments, but why should an American newspaper give foreigners 40 percent of the say over a question of American law?

None of the five respondents is a banker whose bonus would be subject to the cap. You'd think their opinions might be relevant, no?

Four of the five respondents seem, in one way or another, to favor caps or some other crackdown on banker bonuses. If the editors wanted a real debate, they'd get roughly equal numbers in favor and against.

The Times biography of one of the debate participants reports that "he is on Tweeter." The hyperlink is to Twitter, which the Times opinion editors apparently can't even spell correctly.

"He is on Tweeter."

What a sorry showing.

It's the illusion of a debate, not a real debate. It suggests that in fact, there is not room for debate, at least at the Times.

Governor Cuomo's Friday radio comments that "extreme conservatives" "have no place in the state of New York" are generating a good deal of public reaction, some of it quite furious, in the press, but readers who rely on the New York Times for their news are missing the story, which so far as I can tell the Times has so far totally ignored, or missed, which is strange.

Thanks to reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creator J. for sending the tip.

Today's Times carries a dismissive brief review of a play, "The Surrender," about what the Times describes as "the joys of anal sex":

Given Ms. Bentley's writerly skills, what is truly shocking about "The Surrender," on the page and onstage, is how badly written it is, pun laden and cliché riddled, full of numbing details about items like crotchless panties.

If the play is so bad, one wonders why it merited a nearly 1,000-word friendly advance feature in the Times about a rehearsal, advance publicity that many plays in New York that are not "badly written" would surely like to receive, but few do.

The New York Times has been supplying some news coverage of a crackdown on gays in Nigeria.

Today's paper carries a brief report that consists of two paragraphs, the second of which reads as follows:

A roundup of gay men, accused of belonging to a gay organization, has begun in Bauchi State, rights activists and officials said, though they disagreed over how many had been arrested, The Associated Press reported. Dorothy Aken'Ova, director of Nigeria's International Center for Reproductive Health and Sexual Rights, said the police detained four gay men last month and tortured them until they named others. The police have since arrested 38 men and were looking for 168 others, Ms. Aken'Ova told The A.P. Mustapha Baba Ilela, chairman of the Bauchi State Shariah Commission, told the agency that 11 gay men had been arrested, and he denied that any had been mistreated.

Yesterday's paper carried a 13-paragraph news article about the situation. The penultimate paragraph read:

Nigeria's population, divided roughly in half between Christians and Muslims, is deeply conservative, with widespread hostility to homosexuality in both religious communities.

This is the sort of thing that one might expect the Times to editorialize about, but no editorial has yet appeared. Perhaps the impulse to blame Christian conservatives for the human rights abuse is at odds with the Times tendency to deny the culpability of Islam. Rest assured that if Israel had rounded up and tortured gays, it would be front-page news and the Times editorialists would be frothing in condemnation.

A scathing review in today's New York Times of a hotel restaurant suggests that a union contract may be a barrier to culinary excellence:

Perhaps the restaurant was awful because Mr. Richard wasn't actually involved. It's true that he is not the owner, but neither does he have the kind of licensing and consulting deal that has often made the names of Gordon Ramsay or Todd English little more than celebrity endorsements. He is a partner, a publicist said, sharing in profits and overseeing "day-to-day operations." A union contract limits his ability to hire and fire cooks, but that didn't keep Paul Liebrandt and Justin Bogle from pulling off formidable technical feats when they ruled this kitchen.

If union cooks make it harder to run a good restaurant, what does that say about how the unionized reporting staff at the New York Times affects the newspaper's journalism?

Thanks to reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creator J. for sending the tip.