It's hard not to be moved by the deeply reported story of Dasani, an 11-year-old who lived for three years with her parents and seven siblings in a single room of a fetid homeless shelter in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Yet the Times takes a story of poverty and turns it into something else — an ideological axe-grinding piece that seeks to fit Dasani's story into what Times editors have promised will be "a new focus on inequality" to match the agenda of the city's mayor-elect Bill de Blasio.

So the Times article includes passages like this:

she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.

In the short span of Dasani's life, her city has been reborn. The skyline soars with luxury towers, beacons of a new gilded age. More than 200 miles of fresh bike lanes connect commuters to high-tech jobs, passing through upgraded parks and avant-garde projects like the High Line and Jane's Carousel. Posh retail has spread from its Manhattan roots to the city's other boroughs. These are the crown jewels of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's long reign, which began just seven months after Dasani was born.

In the shadows of this renewal, it is Dasani's population who have been left behind. The ranks of the poor have risen, with almost half of New Yorkers living near or below the poverty line. Their traditional anchors — affordable housing and jobs that pay a living wage — have weakened as the city reorders itself around the whims of the wealthy.

Long before Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio rose to power by denouncing the city's inequality, children like Dasani were being pushed further into the margins, and not just in New York. Cities across the nation have become flash points of polarization, as one population has bounced back from the recession while another continues to struggle. One in five American children is now living in poverty, giving the United States the highest child poverty rate of any developed nation except for Romania....Dasani's trials are not solely of her parents' making. They are also the result of decisions made a world away, in the marble confines of City Hall. With the economy growing in 2004, the Bloomberg administration adopted sweeping new policies intended to push the homeless to become more self-reliant. They would no longer get priority access to public housing and other programs, but would receive short-term help with rent. Poor people would be empowered, the mayor argued, and homelessness would decline.

But the opposite happened. As rents steadily rose and low-income wages stagnated, chronically poor families like Dasani's found themselves stuck in a shelter system with fewer exits. Families are now languishing there longer than ever — a development that Mr. Bloomberg explained by saying shelters offered "a much more pleasurable experience than they ever had before."...In 1985, the city repurposed the former hospital into a shelter for families. This was the dawn of the period known as "modern homelessness," driven by wage stagnation, Reagan-era cutbacks and the rising cost of homes.

And:

One can only imagine the heights Dasani might reach at a school like Packer Collegiate Institute, just 12 blocks west of the shelter. Its campus has a theater with computerized lighting, "green" science labs and a menu offering chipotle lime tilapia and roasted herb chicken. Its middle school cultivates the interests of the "whole child," for whom doors will open to the "public arenas of the world."

Packer's students might learn something from Dasani, too. Parents from five private Brooklyn schools recently filed into Packer, where tuition is over $35,000, to hear a clinical psychologist give a talk on how to raise "self-reliant, appreciative children in a nervous and entitled world."

That world is unlikely to become Dasani's. She is not the kind of child to land a coveted scholarship to private school, which would require a parent with the wherewithal to seek out such opportunities and see them through. For the same reason, Dasani does not belong to New York's fast-growing population of charter school students.

The Times can't write about Dasani's poverty without turning it into an attack on President Reagan (who left office in 1988, more than a dozen years before Dasani was even born) and on private schools like Packer. It's too bad, because reporting of the sort that the Times does on Dasani, her family, and the shelter system could actually be useful in improving things for poor children. Forcing it into the Reagan-bashing "inequality" mold just discredits it and makes it more likely that people will tune it out like just one more speech about inequality from President Obama.

The New York Times news article about President Obama suddenly acknowledging that he had lived with his illegal immigrant uncle manages, oddly, to avoid describing the uncle as illegal. The Boston Globe provides a much more straightforward account:

His uncle had lived in the United States illegally since the 1970s and revealed for the first time in testimony that his famous nephew had stayed at his Cambridge apartment for about three weeks. At the time, Onyango Obama was here illegally and fighting deportation.

There was something off about the front-of-the-business section profile of the Farber-Castell pencil company and its chief executive, Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell, that ran in the Times this week.

For one thing, while the article went into the German company's history in some detail — "Faber-Castell was founded by Kasper Faber, a carpenter's apprentice. His great-grandson Lothar Faber was given noble status in 1861 by King Maximilian II of Bavaria after building the company into the world's dominant pencil maker. Later generations intermarried with the aristocratic Castell clan, creating the Faber-Castell name" — it omitted any mention of the company's history during World War II. From an article in the Telegraph earlier this year:

The Faber-Castell firm, for example, had a Nazi background all of its own. Back in the day – June 6th 1944, to be precise – the Countess Faber-Castell had played piano duets with Goebbels. (The encounter is described in his diary, still a key text for connoisseurs of unintentional comedy all over the world.) It would have been interesting to hear a brief summary of how the firm had come through the process of denazification.

The history section of the Faber-Castell web site airbrushes this story, declaring only that, "The Second World War again wrought great economic harm." Well, that is one way to look at it. If it is Count Anton-Wolfgang von Faber-Castell's mother who was the one playing piano duets with Goebbels, that might have been something that the New York Times reporter might have wanted to, you know, ask the count about during the interview that ran under the headline "Hands-On Barvarian Count Presides Over a Pencil-Making Empire."

Also omitted from the Times article on Faber-Castell was any mention of Staedtler, another large German pencil company that is six miles down the road. A BBC article in 2011 reported that the "keen rivalry" and proximity of the two companies has spurred them to innovate and export.

The reporter who wrote the Times article, Jack Ewing, is a veteran of the International Herald Tribune, which has now been merged into the newly "international" New York Times. The Times is going to have to be careful to make sure that the IHT's lower editorial standards don't bleed into the Times. Or perhaps the issue is that the IHT — and the International New York Times — are written for a global audience, whereas the New York Times at least used to be written for an American — or even a New York — audience, for whom the Faber-Castell firm's World War II history might be something to explore rather than to gloss over.

A front-page New York Times article about Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and his wife Chirlane McCray reports:

It was Ms. McCray, after all, who selected the symbolically rich location for Mr. de Blasio's speech announcing his candidacy: the yard in front of the family's humble rowhouse in Park Slope.

Humble? The Real Deal reports that Mr. de Blasio "owns a pair of two-family homes on 11th Street in Park Slope that are valued at more than $1.1 million apiece." You can bet that if Mr. de Blasio were a Republican calling for tax cuts instead of a Democrat former Sandinista activist calling for tax increases on the rich, the Times would be referring to his real estate holdings not as a "humble rowhouse" but as a "luxury townhouse."

The ambitious and lengthy New York Times series by Elisabeth Rosenthal on health care pricing has been illuminating and will probably win a Pulitzer, but sometimes a left-wing agenda — or sometimes not so much an agenda but just a set of unexamined assumptions — can't help but peek through even in the best Times journalism. From the latest Times article, on the price of getting stitched up at a hospital emergency room:

The main reason for high hospital costs in the United States, economists say, is fiscal, not medical: Hospitals are the most powerful players in a health care system that has little or no price regulation in the private market.

Think about that for a minute. Walmart is a powerful player in the retail market, and it's known for low prices, not high ones. Amazon is a powerful player in the publishing market and it uses its power to deliver low ebook prices to consumers. McDonald's is a powerful player in the food market and it uses its power to deliver "dollar menu" pricing. Most parts of the American economy have "little or no price regulation in the private market." To take one example that cuts close to the Times bottom line, prices of online advertising are not regulated, and they keep going down, even as the Times keeps increasing the (unregulated) price of having the newspaper delivered to one's doorstep.

There are other factors at work that the Times touches on that are probably more important. One is the lack of information for individual consumers on prices. Trying to figure out in advance your out of pocket costs for a hospital procedure is nearly impossible. Another is the prevalence of third-party payers. Another is the limits on supply and competition — barriers to entry — created by caps on medical residency slots, restrictions on foreign-trained physicians who want to practice in the U.S., and "certificate of need" requirements for new facilities. FInally, people who can afford it are willing to pay a lot for services that will save their lives or improve their health, and for the perception of high quality. In other words, there are lots of factors here other than the lack of government regulation. Some of the factors are even cases where the presence of government regulation contributes to the higher costs. But the Times highlights the lack of government regulation, because it has an assumption that more regulation is good.

A front-page Times dispatch from London about Rebekah Brooks, a news executive "facing charges of illegally intercepting voice messages and other crimes in connection with their work for Mr. Murdoch's now-defunct News of the World tabloid" reports:

from appearances at least, she is a changed woman. Her clingy, look-at-me clothes have been replaced by functional skirts and blouses; she wears little makeup.

The reference to "clingy, look-at-me clothes" struck me as odd, and something an editor should have edited out. People wear clingy clothing for all kinds of reasons — comfort, weight gain, fashion, problems with static electricity. Ascribing "look-at-me" as a motive for wearing the clothing, in the absence of any evidence, is an example of the kind of over-the-top schadenfreude that has characterized the Times coverage of this case from the get-go. The case, at this point, involves the British government pursuing throwing newspaper editors in jail as punishment for subordinates who allegedly violated the law in their newsgathering techniques. If the American government tried to do this to a Times editor whose reporter who tried, say, to get a source to leak classified documents or information about the NSA, the Times would be on its high horse about the First Amendment. But since it is a Murdoch paper and Murdoch's former executives being pursued, the Times is cheering on the British investigation.

Smartertimes readers can judge for themselves: Here is a page from the Daily Mail with some pictures of Rebekah Brooks, and here are some pages with images of New York Times editor Jill Abramson. The next time the New York Times writes about Ms. Abramson, should it describe her as wearing "clingy, look-at-me-clothes"?

After announcing in the Public Editor column that the metro section would place "a new focus on inequality," the Times is off to the races.

Sunday brought a news article headlined "Life on $7.25 an Hour." An astute Smartertimes reader-participant-community member-watchdog-content co-creator pointed out, however, "the article's main character, Eduardo Shoy, doesn't actually make $7.25/hour as in the article's penultimate paragraph it notes that, 'On a good day [he] can make up to $75 in tips.'"

So the guy the Times focuses on for its article on "life on $7.25 an hour" actually makes $7.25 an hour plus up to $75 a day in tips, plus, the article reports, an additional fee of $1.20 per delivery "to help defray his fuel costs." And that work is a second job — he also works for $13 an hour as a forklift operator at Kennedy airport. The guy owns a house in New York City that he bought in 2003 for what the Times says was "more than $500,000" — it doesn't give the exact amount, or say what the house is worth now or how large the mortgage is on it. It says his expenses include "his children's car insurance premiums" (the children are 19 and 22).

If "life on $7.25 an hour" includes three cars and a New York City residence worth more than half a million dollars, the Times' "new focus on inequality" may not be making exactly the point it set out to make, because by global standards, Mr. Shoy is rich.

Today's installment in the inequality focus is the debut of a new column, The Working Life:

She walks with the confidence of the successful professional she once was, the corporate manager with the office overlooking Times Square, the six-figure salary and those late-night glides back to Staten Island in that sleek company car.

Look closer, though, and you'll notice the peeling paint on her front porch, the crumbling chimney, the dilapidated garage, the telltale signs of a downsized life.

Ms. Scarino has been laid off twice, "discarded," as she puts it. Her husband, a project manager at an architectural firm, lost his job, too. His only alternative paid 20 percent less.

"That world, that security we had, is gone," said Ms. Scarino, 62, who says she and her husband burned through their savings to stay afloat.

This is life in New York City, four years after the Great Recession officially ended. Ms. Scarino, who lost her job at a law firm in 2009, spent two years hunting for work before another law firm hired her in 2011. In March, she was laid off again.

The Times metro section as propagandist for the de Blasio administration's grim class warfare focus is off to quite a start.

David Carr's front-page article on New York magazine reducing its print publishing schedule to 26 issues a year from 42 issues a year misspells the name of Newsweek owner Sidney Harman. The Times renders the name incorrectly as "Harmon."

The public editor of the Times has a blog post under the headline 'An Article About New Yorkers Who Go Hungry Signals a New Focus on Inequality."

Not a new focus on poverty, mind you, but on "inequality." There are those of us who might have been under the impression that the Times was quite vigorously focused on inequality already (to the point where a regular headline around here is "always the inequality"), but apparently the newspaper's editors feel the paper can obsess even more about the issue. From the public editor post:

Wendell Jamieson, the Metro editor, told me that Tuesday's article is not merely incidental.

"The conversation is changing," he said, in New York City with the election of a new mayor, Bill de Blasio, whose campaign focused on inequality in the city.

...The Times has other changes in mind. For example, the reporter Rachel Swarns on Monday will begin a weekly column, "The Working Life," exploring "the experience of working – or not working – in New York," Mr. Jamieson said. And Michael Powell's "Gotham" column will change to twice from once a week to help highlight some of the experiences of lower-income New Yorkers.

"Michael has a great ear for this subject," Mr. Jamieson said.

New York voters have indicated, he said, that "inequality in the city is of grave importance." As a result, for the Metro desk, "this is a moment to adjust our focus."

It's great to see The Times responding in this way and will be fascinating to see how it plays out.

I'm not sure I follow the logic of the Times adjusting its news coverage to advance the policy agenda of the newly elected mayor. If a conservative candidate had been elected on a platform of reducing excess taxes and regulation, would the Times all of a sudden double the frequency of its right-leaning columnists in the metro section and adjust the focus of the metro section to add coverage of excess taxes and regulation? Here I thought, perhaps mistakenly, that one of the functions of a newspaper was to challenge politicians, not merely to echo or reinforce the agenda of the politicians. If the news standards of the Times are to be so easily swayed by election results, perhaps the citizens of New York shouldn't merely elect a mayor, but they should also elect the Times editor every four years.

The public editor, both by cheering on additional inequality coverage and by her last column seeking Al Gore's advice on coverage of climate change, isn't exactly keeping readers guessing about her own political outlook.

The Times public editor column is about its coverage of climate change. The public editor reports that she "talked to Times journalists and outside observers who are close readers of The Times's environment coverage — including former Vice President Al Gore, a leading voice and a former newspaper journalist himself." The column concludes with a passage quoting Mr. Gore:

"Simply assuming that this is an interesting controversy that we should check in on occasionally is not correct. The survival of human civilization is at risk," Mr. Gore said. "The news media should be making this existential crisis the No. 1 topic they cover."

Does the public editor agree with Mr. Gore's view? She doesn't say, but she does let him have the last word in her column. The column doesn't say whether any fossil-fuel company executives were interviewed.

From Roger Cohen's column in today's Times:

Obama and Kerry are ready to entertain Iran's rehabilitation.
Not Israel under Benjamin Netanyahu, who wants to keep Iran down. "Push us down, that is all I hear when I listen to Netanyahu," one Stanford and Harvard-educated Iranian businessman told me. He has a strong belief that drawing Iran closer to the world is essential, a strong dislike of the Iranian regime, and a strong sense of outrage at Israel's contempt for Iran's national aspirations.

Whoo-hoo, this anonymous Iranian businessman went to Stanford and Harvard, so Times readers should definitely pay attention to what he has to say? That seems to be the point of mentioning his education. The Cohen column doesn't mention Prime Minister Netanyahu's two degrees from MIT. Israel doesn't have contempt for "Iran's national aspirations." It had a fine relationship with Iran when the Shah was in power. But the "rehabilitation" of Iran entertained by Messrs. Obama and Kerry seems to involve Iran pretending to give up some aspects of its nuclear weapons program while continuing to fund terrorism, oppose the Arab-Israeli peace process, and abuse the human rights of the Iranian people. You don't need to be some anonymous source with a fancy education to figure out that that is not a great deal for either Israel or America.

"Which works, policies or right or left?" is how the New York Times teased, on the front of its Sunday Review section, an article claiming that the liberal policies of Minnesota's Democrat-Farmer-Labor governor, Mark Dayton, have been more successful than the conservative policies of Wisconsin's Republican governor, Scott Walker.

There's a question that any regular Times reader could guess the answer to. The problem with the analysis is that it avoids mention of other states in which conservative policies have been successful, such as California or Florida. Even if the focus of the article is the Midwest, how about Indiana, or Michigan? The Times article talks a lot about spending on K-12 education. Is the payoff for increased education spending really that fast in terms of job creation? Neither one of these policies have been in place long enough to see much in the way of results. The Times article makes much of a Forbes list of the "best states for business." But there are other such lists. One issued by the Tax Foundation puts Wisconsin at 43 and Minnesota at 45, showing that neither state is particularly business-friendly and that there isn't much difference between the two.

Elliott Abrams does his own fine job of dissecting the Thomas Friedman column passage that was covered here the other day.

"Even if a jumpsuit seems daunting at first, wearers often become quite evangelical once they discover how effortless it is to wear." — The New York Times, article headlined "Time to Take the Leap."

The Times public editor has posted a blog item calling the photo selection for the Times article about an attack on an Israeli soldier — an image of the mother of the attacker — "wrong." The matter was covered here the other day.