New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes:

Never have I seen Israel and America's core Arab allies working more in concert to stymie a major foreign policy initiative of a sitting U.S. president, and never have I seen more lawmakers — Democrats and Republicans — more willing to take Israel's side against their own president's. I'm certain this comes less from any careful consideration of the facts and more from a growing tendency by many American lawmakers to do whatever the Israel lobby asks them to do in order to garner Jewish votes and campaign donations.

This is really a loathsome passage. It ignores the possibility that it might also be in America's interest to avoid some sham deal with Iran that would leave the Iranian dictators in power with the ability to continue supporting terrorism, abusing the human rights of the Iranian people, and opposing the Arab-Israeli peace process, and secretly continuing to pursue nuclear weapons. If Jewish votes (a small fraction of the electorate) and campaign donations are as important as Mr. Friedman claims, how is it that Mr. Obama dares to cross this all-powerful Jewish lobby? If Mr. Friedman has evidence of a particular congressman swayed by "campaign donations," he should report it. But he manages to be "certain" about this without the burden of providing any facts that might make readers share the certainty. Mr. Friedman also doesn't give any indication that this supposed tendency by lawmakers is "growing." Mr. Friedman's claim about the growing influence of "the Israel lobby" is itself hard to square with the endless New York Times hype about J Street, the Pew survey, Peter Beinart, and other claims that American Jewish support for Israel or its policies is declining or no longer as uniform as it once was.

Yesterday's post about the use of anonymous sources in the Times profile of Israeli general Herzl Halevi drew the following comment from Belladonna Rogers:

there's another, even more serious error in the Times article on General Halevi, and it is contained in this sentence, a sentence that quotes no one; it merely expresses a so-called "fact" that the reporter wishes to convey as if it were a fact, which it is not. Here's the sentence:

"Hezbollah is seen as Iran's proxy and the Palestinians' enforcer, the
boots on the ground in global terrorist attacks and the likeliest to
retaliate for Israeli aggression anywhere in the world."

"Israeli aggression"? When any other country defends itself from attacks, the word to describe what it does is "defense."

When Israel defends itself from attacks, The New York Times news columns call it "Israeli aggression."

Editorializing in the news columns, and fabricating a narrative, are, in my opinion, even more egregious errors of journalistic ethics than citing anonymous sources who happen to agree with the newspaper's reporters, columnists, editorial board -- and owner.

At the American Enterprise Institute's "Ideas" blog, Professor Mark Perry notices that the New York Times has changed its editorial position on the minimum wage issue. In 1987, the paper had an editorial headlined, "The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00." It argued that raising the minimum wage would increase unemployment. Nowadays, the paper is editorializing in favor of a $15 an hour minimum wage.

From an otherwise fascinating Times profile of an Israeli general, Herzl Halevi:

Some who have served with him say General Halevi struggles to connect with soldiers. "He's not a man of men, he is not the center of the party, and there are voices saying that he's too complicated," said one former colleague, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to do so frankly. "He is too political, too much involved with who will be nominated to where, and not all the considerations were only professional. Some of it was, 'Does he belong to my tribe or not?' "

From what was, at least earlier this year, the posted Times policy on the use of anonymous sources (the policy seems to have been removed from the Times Web site, or at least relocated):

"We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack. If pejorative opinions are worth reporting and cannot be specifically attributed, they may be paraphrased or described after thorough discussion between writer and editor. The vivid language of direct quotation confers an unfair advantage on a speaker or writer who hides behind the newspaper, and turns of phrase are valueless to a reader who cannot assess the source."

General Halevi doesn't really respond to this criticism in the article, and it is not clear whether the Times gave him the chance to. It strikes me as a cheap shot.

From a New York Times article claiming that Washington, D.C. is "the gayest place in America":

On the days I make the 20-minute walk from home to my office near the White House, I will pass one example after another of this city's thriving gay economy: a Mitchell Gold & Bob Williams furniture store; a clothing retailer whose window displays regularly feature bare-torso, well-endowed mannequins in nothing but tiny briefs; three CrossFit gyms; the offices of two gay newspapers, The Washington Blade and Metro Weekly (most cities cannot even sustain one); a bathhouse; and the national headquarters for the Human Rights Campaign.

Maybe I am missing something. Probably I am missing something. But I know three CrossFit gym users and all of them are married to persons of the opposite sex. Earlier Times coverage of the CrossFit phenomenon (here, for example), has not characterized it as a business that is part of the "gay economy." Absent further explanation, the reference seems strange.

The editor of the New York Observer (here) and the editor of Commentary (here) remark on the Times' choice of a photograph to illustrate a story about an attack on an Israeli soldier. The Times chose a photo of the mother of the attacker rather than of the mother of the victim, or a photo of the victim.

Times art critic Roberta Smith offers her reaction to the news that Francis Bacon's "Three Studies of Lucian Freud" sold for $142 million at auction:

Auctions have become the leading indicator of ultra-conspicuous consumption, pieces of public, male-dominated theater in which collectors, art dealers and auction houses flex their monetary clout, mostly for one another. The spectacle of watching these privileged few (mostly hedge fund managers and investment-hungry consortiums, it seems) tossing around huge amounts of money has become a rarefied spectator sport. These events are painful to watch yet impossible to ignore and deeply alienating if you actually love art for its own sake.

More than ever, the glittery auction-house/blue-chip gallery sphere is spinning out of control far above the regular workaday sphere where artists, dealers and everyone else struggle to get by.

I love art and don't find the auction result either "painful" or "deeply alienating." Rather, I find it inspiring that human genius and practice can turn a canvas and some tubes of paint into something worth $142 million. The article doesn't explain what's so intrinsically evil about hedge fund managers, but in any event past buyers of costly paintings have included the Getty Museum, casino and hotel operator Steve Wynn, and businessman Ronald Lauder, who, as the New York Sun pointed out in a memorable 2006 editorial, Lauder's Vision, understands that the aesthetic value of art and the monetary value are not unrelated.

Finally, the dichotomy the Times draws between "the glittery auction-house/blue-chip gallery sphere" and "the regular workaday sphere where artists, dealers and everyone else struggle to get by," is a false one. Which of those two spheres does the Times art critic inhabit? It's a permeable division, like that between major league and minor league baseball, or between small local newspapers and the global New York Times, in which the existence of each enriches the other.

From a review on the front of today's Times arts section by Times critic Dwight Garner of the book A Colossal Wreck, by Alexander Cockburn:

Mr. Cockburn was prescient. He saw Wall Street's 2008 collapse coming from a mile away, with the overturning in 1995 of the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking.

From a May 21, 2012 column by Times Dealbook editor Andrew Ross Sorkin:

A meme around Glass-Steagall has been created, repeated so often that it has almost become conventional wisdom: the repeal of Glass-Steagall led to the financial crisis of 2008. And, the thinking goes, has become almost religious for some people, that if the law were reinstated, we would avoid the next crisis.

The facts — basic facts — just aren't that convenient. ..Here's the key: Glass-Steagall wouldn't have prevented the last financial crisis.

An article on the front of the business section in today's Times runs under the headline, "Suit Charges Three Credit Ratings Agencies With Fraud in Bear Stearns Case."

It reports:

"We sold our soul to the devil for revenue," a Moody's employee said in an internal document.

Oddly, the Times article does not make any mention of the fact that Moody's largest shareholder, according to Yahoo! Finance, is Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, with, as of June 30, 2013, a stake of roughly 11.5% worth roughly $1.5 billion. Mr. Buffett recently boasted to CNBC about his return on the investment: "We're selling Moody's at six times what we paid."

So Mr. Buffett's Berkshire made a 600% profit on its billion-dollar-plus stake in a company getting sued for fraud that has, as the Times puts it, "come under widespread criticism in the wake of the financial crisis." If it were some right-wing billionaires, like the Koch brothers, who had done this deal instead of St. Warren of Omaha, you think maybe the Times would have seen fit to mention their role?

The Home section of the Times carries an item that reads, in its entirety, as follows:

A new superyacht by Zaha Hadid presents the billionaire playboy with a problem. There is undeniable prestige of trolling Mediterranean harbors in a yacht designed by a Pritzker-prize-winning architect. But the boat's outer shell is made of an interwoven network of support bands, which gives it a futuristic webbed look and obscures the primary decks. Who on shore will see the bikinied frolicking?

Ms. Hadid collaborated on the design of a master prototype, above left and right, with Blohm & Voss, a Hamburg-based shipbuilder known for innovation in the field (the firm worked with Philippe Starck on a superyacht, and built the world's second-largest private yacht, Eclipse). A fleet of five yachts is being developed from the original design, with each boat varying based on buyer preferences. First up is a 295-foot yacht named Jazz, top.

Could the exoskeleton be altered so its owner and guests can party in full view of the have-nots? For the right price, one imagines, anything is possible.

Well, can the yacht's design be altered, or not? Rather than doing any actual reporting by, say, calling the architect or the shipbuilder and asking, the Times resorts to imagination. That's lame.

The article also carries the bizarre assumption that the point of being on a boat is to show off to "the have-nots" on shore. I'm not sure where the Times gets this idea, because a lot of these large yachts tend to frequent pretty prosperous ports. Maybe some yacht-buyers like their privacy, which is why they are on a yacht instead of at, say, a hotel. The whole item is shot through with a tone of derisive envy toward anyone who might enjoy buying or renting such a vessel, a tone that is all too common when the Times writes about the non-Sulzberger rich.

The editor Seth Lipsky used to mock articles labeled "news analysis" by suggesting that the rest of the articles in the newspaper be labeled "analysis-free." Consider the following passage from a New York Times "news analysis" of the challenges facing New York's mayor-elect, Bill de Blasio:

In one possible situation, the governor could find money for Mr. de Blasio's prekindergarten classes, but avoid enacting new taxes — depriving the mayor-elect of the potent political dividends that come with making the wealthy pay more.

How can the Times news analysts be so confident that raising taxes on "the wealthy" is such a "potent" political winner? What's the evidence for that proposition? Does the Times really think that if Mr. De Blasio somehow found a way to fund expanded universal pre-kindergarten with state aid but did not raise taxes on the rich beyond the 51.7% top marginal rate (federal, state, and local combined) that currently applies in New York City, his supporters will be bitterly disappointed?

This is really something: the idea that higher taxes on the rich — higher than the current levels under which the governments take more than 51.7 cents of every additional dollar earned — ought to be pursued not merely as means to the end of additional funding for education or health care or poverty relief or some other worthy goal, but because of the "potent political dividends." Or what, just envy? Punishing success? Leveling? I don't necessarily buy that this is the mood or view among a majority of the electorate, but it certainly is an indication of how the matter is viewed among a segment of the Times reporters and editors.

From an article on the front of the New York Times business section:

The history of SAC's rise as it became one of the biggest and most successful hedge funds and its subsequent fall, punctuated by the settlement on Monday, is part of a larger story of how the industry has evolved since the 1980s, when insider trading charges were treated with the seriousness of a parking ticket.

Was the reporter who wrote this article even alive in the 1980s? Was the editor who moved the article along even alive in the 1980s?

Here is a New York Times headline from December 19, 1987: "Boesky sentenced to 3 years in jail in insider scandal."

Here is a New York Times headline from 1989: "'Junk Bond' Leader Is Indicted by U.S. In Criminal Action."

There's something not quite kosher about the Times coverage of a scientific study comparing "the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant E. coli bacteria on four types of chickens: those raised conventionally; organically; without antibiotics, and those slaughtered under kosher rules."

First, the Times quotes the study's lead author saying: "Every other week for 10 weeks, I would go and spend the entire Saturday buying chicken." Kosher butchers tend to be closed on Saturdays, which is the Jewish sabbath, which raises some unanswered questions about the study's methodology.

Second, the Times article includes a comment from "an organic farming consultant who reviewed the study at The New York Times' request." But the Times article includes no comment from any kosher chicken producer, retailer, or "consultant." Why give the organic chicken folks a chance to defend their product but not the kosher chicken folks? Could it possibly be because the Times newsroom personnel love organic chicken but, with few exceptions, don't care much about eating kosher?

Third, in respect of the kosher issue, the Times article includes this passage:

Almost twice as many of the kosher chicken samples tested positive for antibiotic-resistant E. coli as did the those from conventionally raised birds. And even the samples from organically raised chickens and those raised without antibiotics did not significantly differ from the conventional ones.

"I was pretty sure that blessings wouldn't protect chicken from antibiotic resistance," said Lance B. Price, a professor at George Washington University and an expert on antibiotic resistance who worked with Mr. Millman on the study.

The idea that it is "blessings" that make the difference between a kosher chicken a non-kosher chicken is a misconception. Here is a summary from the Web site of one kosher certifier:

Misconceptions about Kosher

Before we begin explaining in detail what "kosher" is, let's first clarify what it is not:

"I thought "kosher" means that a Rabbi blessed the food" – False! There are blessings that observant Jews recite before partaking of food, but that has nothing to do with making the food kosher. A food is kosher only if it conforms to the Jewish dietary laws.

The Times here propagates the misconception by repeating it.

All in all, a disappointing performance.

One of the ways the Times displays its left-wing bias is in the news-section columns. It's one thing to have an op-ed page that tilts left. But in the New York Times, the Sunday metro section regularly carries a left-wing column by Ginia Bellafante and the Saturday business section regularly carries a left-wing column by James Stewart, with no right-wing or even center-right column to balance them out.

This past weekend was no exception. Mr. Stewart, who in his previous column proposed increased taxation without representation on "ultrawealthy nonresidents who own property in New York City," is at it again. This time around, he wants to raise taxes on what he calls "The fortunate 400 people with the highest adjusted gross incomes." Mr. Stewart writes:

The I.R.S. doesn't identify the members of the elite 400, but they surely include some top hedge fund managers. In 2009, the minimum income required to make the top 25 in the annual ranking of top-earning hedge fund managers by AR: Absolute Return+ Alpha magazine was $350 million. That suggests that all of them would have been among the top 400.

Among those at the top of the rankings that year were David Tepper, founder of Appaloosa Management, who earned an estimated $4 billion; George Soros, who earned $3.3 billion; James Simons of Renaissance Technologies, who made $2.5 billion; and John Paulson, at $2.3 billion, who famously bet against mortgage-backed securities and cashed in on the housing collapse.

The AR numbers appear to include the unrealized capital gains of the managers' own money in their funds. Since unrealized gains don't count toward the IRS definition of adjusted gross income, it's not clear that the changes he proposes, of increasing taxes on dividends and capital gains, would even have that great an effect. Warren Buffett, for example, who is not a hedge fund manager but who is one of the richest people in the country, wouldn't be materially affected.

No matter what one thinks of Mr. Stewart's argument, the fact is that two Saturdays in a row the Times business section has carried a column calling for tax increases. Where's the Times business section column calling for tax cuts?

Meanwhile, the Times Sunday metro section carries a column reporting that "The idea that a de Blasio administration would alienate the wealthy, that the wealthy would revolt against relatively slight tax increases and move to Miami, that they would endure any significant marginalization in the narrative of the city, seems to be losing its currency." The evidence for that is that rich people in the real estate industry are giving Mr. de Blasio money. Reports the Times:

"No sane person believes we are turning the clock back to the Dinkins days," Fred Peters, president of Warburg Realty, said.

The column doesn't seem to consider the possibility that these real estate people are giving money to Mr. de Blasio because they want their projects approved, rather than out of some kind of great optimism about or ideological sympathy with his policy proposals.

The New York Times reports without skepticism on the call by Pimco's Bill Gross to increase capital gains tax rates to the current rates on ordinary income. The Times writes:

Mr. Gross was referring to tax breaks that some of the wealthiest Americans receive because they earn their income through investments, which are taxed at a lower rate than regular income. This has led to a yawning gap between the rich and the poor.

The lower rate on capital gains applies not only to "the wealthiest Americans" but to any American who has a long-term capital gain, whether as a result of selling a home or a business or through a mutual fund. The notion that the cause of the gap between rich and poor is the difference between ordinary income rates and capital gains rates is unproven — if one buys the claim that that gap has increased in recent decades, the increase has actually come as the difference between the capital gains rate and the ordinary income rate declined. At the end of the Reagan administration, the two rates were the same, and people were still complaining about income inequality. People are complaining about income inequality now, but the difference now between the top income tax rate and the top capital gains rate is smaller now than it was in the 1950s, the supposed heyday of the middle class, when the top income tax rate was 91% and the top capital gains rate was 25%. There are other possible explanations for the supposed rise in income inequality, such as globalization, that have nothing to do with the difference in tax rates. Without the difference, the appreciation of an asset because of inflation is fully taxable. This isn't really a tax "break," it's just the way tax law is structured so that people don't get taxed on inflation. Some other countries have no capital gains tax at all, and increasing capital gains taxes in the way Mr. Gross suggests would make America less competitive relative to those countries, another point that the Times does not mention.

The Times makes no mention of the fact that Mr. Gross makes his money managing a big bond fund, and that bond interest is taxed as ordinary income. Eliminating the tax advantage of stock funds relative to bond funds would be good for Mr. Gross's business. That may not be his motivation — he may be motivated purely by public policy concerns, or by, as he explains it in his own letter, "guilt." But it is worth pointing out to Times readers nonetheless, the way the Times certainly would if some business executive were advocating a tax cut that would help his own business rather than a tax increase.