The New York Times has an editorial praising an interim agreement concerning Iran's nuclear program. The Times editorial, headlined, "Another Step Toward Nuclear Sanity in Iran," says, "This would be the most significant restraint ever on a program that has threatened international stability since it was first disclosed in 2002 and an undeniably important step toward the peaceful resolution of a serious dispute. Even so, dangerously misguided forces, including leading Democrats and Republicans in Congress, are working to sabotage it."

This is quite a judgment for the Times to reach, considering a news article on page one of the same Times that carries the editorial reports, "The full text of the agreement has not yet been released, arousing the suspicions of critics, though the White House said on Monday that it would soon be made available to lawmakers."

In the editorial, the front-page news article, and a foreign-section news article — thousands of words of coverage — the Times makes no mention of the news that the "moderate" foreign minister of Iran, Javad Zarif, yesterday laid a wreath at the grave in Beirut of Hezbollah terrorist Imad Mughniyeh. For that highly newsworthy news you have to read Elliott Abrams' Pressure Points blog or The Tower.

The Times public editor column over the weekend reported that "the size of the newsroom staff remains at about 1,250 — not only is it huge (The Washington Post is about half that) but it is also remarkable for its stability, as many other newsrooms have shrunk dramatically."

The Times is happy to talk about headcount, but numbers about the actual budget or expenses are harder to come by. The paper has been buying out higher-paid veteran reporters, columnists and editors with lots of experience and replacing them with younger, cheaper, less experienced staff. At the same time, it has been reducing its non-staff news expenses by doing things such as commissioning and printing fewer book reviews from outside freelance contributors.

Earlier estimates of the Times newsroom headcount included a Times news article in October 2009, which said, "The Times's news department peaked at more than 1,330 employees before the last round of cuts. The current headcount is about 1,250." That article was headlined "Times says it will cut 100 newsroom jobs." It's some strange math that allows the Times to cut 100 jobs from 1,250 and still end up with a headcount of 1,250. Maybe a shareholder who bought or sold New York Times Company stock on the basis of the Times announcement that it would reduce the headcount by 100 from 1,250 will sue, alleging the company misled about the planned cuts. Maybe the Times is now counting as Times newsroom employees some former International Herald-Tribune employees who used to be not counted, creating the appearance of stability when in fact there has been shrinkage.

A December 2012 Bloomberg News article headlined "New York Times Looks To Cut 30 Newsroom Positions" reported, "The Times has a total of about 1,100 newsroom employees."

If in fact the number has fluctuated from 1,330 to 1,100 to 1,250, some might interpret that not as "stability" but as variability. My point here is not to criticize the Times for any cuts. They do have a lot of reporters. But if they are going to make a big show of how many reporters they have, they should be transparent and consistent about the overall news budget, rather than conduct themselves in a way that makes them look like they are trying to convey a false impression of stability in an environment of instability.

The New York Times obituary of Ariel Sharon hits a few false notes.

The Times writes:

It was Mr. Sharon's visit, in September 2000, accompanied by hundreds of Israeli police officers, to the holy site in Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, that helped set off the riots that became the second Palestinian uprising.

This account is inaccurate. Former New York Times magazine contributing writer Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in Bloomberg View, describes that uprising as "allegedly, though not actually, triggered by an infamous Ariel Sharon walkabout atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem."

The details are widely available. See for example, Tom Gross, who quotes the Palestinian Authority's communications minister Imad Al-Faluji: "Whoever thinks that the intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon's visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque is wrong. This intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat's return from the Camp David negotiations, where he turned the table upside down on President Clinton." Or BBC Watch, or the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

The Times also reports that Sharon "had a surprising sense of humor." The Times doesn't say who was surprised by this sense of humor. If it was the obituary writer or his editor, the surprise says more about them and their preconceptions than it does about Mr. Sharon.

From a Times news article about "a highly respected figure in the vegetarian and vegan movements" who died after collapsing while jogging in Prospect Park:

His case was publicized in the news media, after the police asked for help identifying him, and among runners when a doctor at the hospital mentioned him to a staff member at JackRabbit Sports, a popular hub for runners in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
"It didn't seem as though he was someone who was homeless," said the doctor, a regular JackRabbit customer who asked not to be named because he was concerned he had violated privacy laws by speaking about Mr. Berry. "So you sort of get a sense of, 'Gee, he belongs to somebody.' "

The seeming casualness with which the Times conceals the identity of a doctor who by his own account is concerned that he is violating privacy laws by discussing a patient with a reporter is troubling. Here we had been under the apparently mistaken impression that journalists are supposed to investigate doctors who break the law, not encourage them by agreeing to conceal their identity.

When Tennessee pastor Andrew Hamblin was charged with a misdemeanor wildlife possession charge in connection with poisonous snakes he uses during services, the Times ran a 24-paragraph news article by a staff reporter, complete with two photographs taken "for the New York Times."

The pastor's exoneration is covered with a one-paragraph brief from the Associated Press picking up a report from the Knoxville News Sentinel. If the case was worth 24 paragraphs and two photos in the first place, isn't its disposition worth similarly detailed coverage? Or was the point just to depict Southern church-goers as a bunch of lawbreaking crazy people?

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

A dispatch from Nevada about bighorn sheep reports, "Surprisingly, many of the nonprofit groups that champion the conservation of bighorn sheep, including the Wild Sheep Foundation and the Fraternity of the Desert Bighorn, based in Las Vegas, are made up almost entirely of hunters."

This is "surprising" only if one labors under the ignorant misconception apparently held by the Times reporter and editor that hunting and conservation are at odds. In fact the hunter Theodore Roosevelt was a champion of the conservation movement, and hunters have long supported environmental groups such as Ducks Unlimited and the National Wildlife Federation.

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

Reader-Participant-Watchdog-Community Member-Content Co-Creator Colin77 makes a shrewd point about a Times news article about high speed rail in California:

Towards the article's conclusion we find this:

If completed, the train line would take travelers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 2 hours 40 minutes. By car, the trip takes close to six hours.

OK, but how about by airplane, which would require no additional infrastructure investments? And how much would that ride cost in each mode of transportation? If we factor in the $68 billion for the rail line's construction and however much is spent on the highway and compare to the two, how much does it cost the state for someone to take a train versus driving their car (as well as the cost of an unsubsidized ticket vs. the cost of taking the car with gas, insurance, etc)? Isn't that important to know in attempting to figuring out the cost-benefit analysis? Why are we presented with one obvious advantage of taking the train but are left in the dark about the costs of this hypothetical LA-SF trip?

The average reader may very well see the difference in time travel and conclude the train is an obvious winner, when in fact the calculation is much more complicated than what the NYT lets on.

The Times itself reported recently on a new airline, Surf Air, offering flights between Burbank, in Southern California, and San Carlos, in Northern California. Southwest Airlines flies the Burbank to Oakland route with scheduled flying times of between an hour and ten minutes and an hour and twenty minutes, for fares as low as $54 one way. Leaving out the airplane comparison while leaving in the "by car" comparison is a subtle way for the Times to skew the debate and make it look like spending $68 billion mostly taxpayer dollars on a railroad is a good idea.

"Rumors Fly Among Hasidim About Abducted Man's Death," is the headline of a New York Times article reporting:

One rumor had it that Mr. Stark had told his wife in recent weeks that he was being followed by men in a car. Another held that Mr. Stark had borrowed $500,000 from a mysterious, unidentified lender the day of his kidnapping.

Mr. Stark's family seemed bewildered by such gossip. A brother and a brother-in-law said the information about Mr. Stark being followed was no more than rumor; several relatives could not say whether Mr. Stark had taken out the loan.

One of his brothers, Eli Stark, 47, said Mr. Stark had never taken loans, not even bank loans to open new buildings. "He never borrowed in his life," his brother said, dismissing each piece of information as hearsay. "Next."

If these are unsubstantiated hearsay rumors or gossip, why do they meet the standard of news that is "fit to print"?

Link via John Cook and Josh Gerstein.

"Two Decades of Change Have Boston Sparkling" is the headline over a New York Times news article that makes Boston sound like some kind of paradise: "one of the most successful urban renaissance stories in modern American history." The newspaper claims, inaccurately, that "The blight that afflicts many urban areas is absent here."

The Times article describes Boston in 1993 as "limping its way out of a recession and still reeling from the crisis over school busing." That's just nonsense. It doesn't take anything away from Mayor Menino's considerable accomplishments to say that Boston in 1993 was pretty nice, not the cesspool that the Times depicts.

The Times credits Mayor Menino, the "big dig' public works project, and the environmental cleanup of Boston harbor for the city's prosperity. Entirely unmentioned by the Times is the fact that Mr. Menino's 20-year mayoralty overlapped with 16 years of Republican governors — Weld, Cellucci, Swift, and Romney — who held the state's taxes and spending in relative restraint and pursued generally business-friendly policies. Where were the Times articles depicting Boston as a blight-free successful urban renaissance story back when Mr. Romney was running for president?

Now, one can say that the credit belongs to Mr. Menino rather than Mr. Romney or Mr. Weld because Boston is prospering while other Massachusetts cities such as New Bedford and Fall River and Pittsfield are struggling. But there are differences between Boston and those cities other than who is the mayor that may account for some of the different outcomes.

From the New York Times editorial on Mayor de Blasio's inauguration:

Too bad the speakers on stage with him didn't get the unity part, marring the event with backward-looking speeches both graceless and smug. Worst among them, but hardly alone, was the new public advocate, Letitia James, who used her moment for her own head-on attack: on the 12 years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In doing so, she made a prop of a 12-year-old girl named Dasani, who had to hold the Bible and Ms. James's hand as Ms. James called for a government "that cares more about a child going hungry than a new stadium or a new tax credit for a luxury development."

Dasani was profiled in a recent series of articles in The Times illustrating how bad things get for homeless families in the shelter system. Ms. James turned her into Exhibit A of an Inauguration Day prosecution: the People v. Mayor Bloomberg. So did the pastor whose invocation likened New York to a "plantation," and Harry Belafonte, who strangely laid the problem of America's crowded prisons at the feet of the former mayor, an utterly bogus claim, while saying Mr. Bloomberg shared responsibility for the nation's "deeply Dickensian justice system."

Mr. Bloomberg had his mistakes and failures, but he was not a cartoon Gilded Age villain. He deserved better than pointless and tacky haranguing from speakers eager to parrot Mr. de Blasio's campaign theme.

In Ms. James' defense, she might have actually read the Times series on Dasani, which did blame Mayor Bloomberg for her plight and portray the mayor, essentially, as a cartoon Gilded Age villain. Or perhaps Ms. James or the "plantation" pastor had been relying on the Times' recent farewell editorial to Mr. Bloomberg, which said that "Mr. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly humiliated and alienated black and Hispanic communities by having stop-and-frisk turn into a generalized method of harassing law-abiding citizens" and said that Mr. Bloomberg's "unscripted comments, especially about the poor, can range from thoughtless to heartless."

I like the view expressed in this most recent Times editorial better than the earlier assessment, but it does seem a bit hypocritical of the Times to criticize the speakers at the inauguration for making criticisms that the Times editorialists themselves have made in the past. Maybe the Times already misses Mr. Bloomberg, or maybe word has come down not to risk alienating Mr. Bloomberg to the point where he is no longer available if he is needed as the sort of a billionaire bailer-outer who would allow the Ochs-Sulzberger family to escape, Graham-style or Taylor-style, with both their capital and their reputation intact.

After a front-of-the-arts section feature December 24 about producer John Goldwyn ("John Goldwyn's grandfather was the G in MGM...As royal Hollywood families go, the Goldwyns are the real deal") the Times piles on with a 2,000-word front-of-the-Sunday Styles section feature about Liz Goldwyn ("Liz Goldwyn is, in fact, a film-world royal — her grandfather was the Hollywood kingpin Samuel Goldwyn").

Is there some public relations agent in the Goldwyn family office pushing this "royal" story line? If not, how does the Times just happen to roll out 3,000 words of breathless royal gushiness about Goldwyns in two pieces in two weeks? Is it a case of one section not knowing what another section was up to? I could maybe see pairing the pieces and running them together or spacing them out more and running them separately. But as it was done, it just looks sort of strange.

From the front-page New York Times news article on the inauguration of Mayor Bill de Blasio: "And he invoked the names of towering liberals in New York's past, including former Gov. Alfred E. Smith and former Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia as left-leaning politicians who proved social reform was possible in a city often synonymous with unfeeling, free-market capitalism."

The words "unfeeling, free-market capitalism" don't appear in the text of Mr. de Blasio's inaugural address, so it's hard to view this as anything other than the Times editors or reporter inserting bizarre opinions into a news article. Are Marxism or socialism more "feeling" than capitalism? Do the editors of the Times really think New York is "often synonymous with unfeeling, free-market capitalism"?

It's just weird.

Felix Salmon (here) and Powerline (here) do good jobs of pushing back against an attack by David Kocieniewski of the New York Times on two economists, Scott Irwin and Craig Pirrong. Professor Pirrong himself writes here:

there are no coincidences, comrades. The NY Times has been Tiger Beat effusive in its praise for Gary Gensler of the CFTC. This piece attacking two of the most prominent academic critics of Gensler's efforts to impose a speculative position limits rule comes out days after the Commission approved a new version of the rule, and is in the midst of the comment period leading up to the formulation of a final rule. Gensler fought for this rule for 5 years, and he views it as an important part of his legacy. That is, there is a clear political agenda at work here: to kneecap those who have the audacity to oppose the regulatory agenda of Gensler and his media acolytes.

The Weekly Standard and Newsmax criticize a New York Times report on the attack on American officials in Benghazi, Libya.

A Times news article about New York's population falling behind that of Florida waits until paragraph 19 of a 23-paragraph article to mention Florida's lower taxes. More emphasis is given to the warm weather in Florida and Texas. If weather were the explanatory factor, however, you'd expect to see a population boom in Cuba, which shares Florida's weather but not its pro-growth economic policies.

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