From a glowingly positive front-page New York Times article about Elizabeth Warren:

in seizing on issues animating her party's base — the influence of big banks, soaring student loan debt and the widening gulf between the wealthy and the working class — Ms. Warren is challenging the centrist economic approach that has been the de facto Democratic policy since President Bill Clinton and his fellow moderates took control of the party two decades ago.

If you are a left-wing New York Times editor or reporter, the "raise taxes on the rich" approach of first-term Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama looks "centrist." I mean, maybe one can make an argument that these guys were more centrist than Maxine Waters, Dennis Kucinich, or Bernie Sanders, but that's an argument, not a flat-out statement to be made as context in a news article. These Democrats may look centrists compared to the extreme-hard-left of their own party, but compared to centrist Republicans, they look like leftists. It's a framing issue, and the frame the Times chooses here gives the Democrats the centrist stamp of approval.

Times columnist Eduardo Porter offers his thoughts on stay-at-home moms:

many women will work until they have children and leave, at least until their children are well on their way in their schooling. Studying survey data on personal well-being, Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago found that college-educated mothers with careers were no more satisfied with their lives, and might be less so, than stay-at-home college-educated mothers.

That hardly seems an ideal outcome for society, however — somewhat like letting sophisticated machinery lie idle and depreciate in plain sight. In any event, asking women to lean in is unlikely to change their minds.

Maybe looking at this (and other issues) from the point of view of "society" is the wrong approach; maybe it's better to look at it from the point of view of the individual woman or family. As for those college-educated stay-at-home mothers, the idea that what they do is at all like letting "machinery lie idle" is bound to generate an irate response from any mothers who have time to bother with Mr. Porter's column in between the carpooling, homework help, making dinner, laundry, teaching and nurturing, household management, and other myriad, important, and tiring tasks.

Here's the lead paragraph of the Times news article about the preliminary election in the Boston mayoral race:

BOSTON — Two white men of Irish descent topped the balloting on Tuesday in the crowded race for mayor of Boston, dashing the hopes of many that this would be the year an African-American woman might have a shot at the top job in City Hall.

Is the most important thing to know about John Connolly and Martin Walsh really that they are "white men of Irish descent"? I live in Boston and have followed the mayoral election closely. If there were "many" who hoped that "this would be the year an African-American woman" would get elected mayor, not enough of them showed up to vote yesterday.

Anyway, the candidates have been talking about issues and substance, yet the Times persists in interpreting the race through a crude identity-politics lens. Who are the real racists? Boston voters, or Times editors and reporters who can't see past a candidate's skin color or national origin? The whole Times article goes on in the bizarre vein.

A front-page New York Times story about the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, includes this passage:

Aides noted that Mr. McConnell ultimately helped broker the bailout of Wall Street in 2008, just weeks before his last re-election campaign came to an end. But in 2008, of course, there was far greater tolerance from the right for the compromise politics that Mr. McConnell has perfected.

"Of course"? For a Times news article to claim that "of course" the Republican Party in 2008 was far more tolerant of compromise than it is today is just plain weird. Today's Republicans just got done with a presidential election cycle in which their nominee was Mitt Romney, who worked with Democrats in the Massachusetts legislature to pass a universal health insurance coverage bill. Back in 2008, the Times was full of articles bemoaning the extremism of Republicans such as Tom Tancredo and Sarah Palin. For the Times, the Republican Party "of course" is constantly in a state of being "far" less tolerant than it was in some imaginary past.

Nice to see the Times taking a skeptical look at Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio's early career as an activist supporter of the Marxist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. This is a bit of a "now they tell us" — it would have been nice if Democratic primary voters had this information before they nominated Mr. de Blasio — but at least it comes before the general election. As recently as 1990 Mr. de Blasio was stating that his goal was democratic socialism.

The editor of the New York Times editorial page, Andrew Rosenthal, is out with a blog post headlined "Putin's Dubious Opinion," saying that President Putin's op-ed piece that ran in the Times contained a claim that "was dubious at the time" and now "seems even less supportable." Good for Mr. Rosenthal for displaying some editorial judgment, though his doing so in a blog post after running the Putin article rather than in editing the Putin article before it appeared seems a bit like an attempt to have it both ways.

The Times travel section has an article about Martha's Vineyard, reporting, "This pocket of Martha's Vineyard — actually the western side of the island — revolves around the towns of Chilmark and Menemsha." Menemsha is not actually a "town" but rather a village within the geographical boundaries of the town of Chilmark.

"House Republicans Pass Deep Cuts in Food Stamps" is the headline over a Times news article that reports on House passage of a bill "that slashes billions of dollars from the food stamp program."

What are these "deep" cuts? The Times article describes them as $40 billion over ten years in a program that, after the cuts, would be "more than $700 billion" over ten years. As a percentage basis, $40 billion out of $740 billion is 5.4 percent. Given that at some point over the next ten years one would hope that the economy and employment will recover to the point where fewer people need food stamps, calling the cuts "deep" in the headline is an exaggeration and an inappropriate injection of opinion. Imagine the outrage on the left if a conservative Times headline writer (pardon the oxymoron) wrote a headline that said "House Republicans Pass Minor Cuts in Food Stamps."

If you read the CBO estimate, the "cuts" are actually $39 billion from a baseline of $764 billion, or 5.1 percent over ten years. Given the inflation assumptions, even after this "deep" cut of 5.1 percent over ten years, it's almost certain that at the end of the ten year period the government would be spending more on food stamps in nominal dollars than it is now.

A nine-paragraph article inside the business section of the Times reports on 22 firms that settled civil charges with the SEC in connection with shorting a company's shares before an initial public offering, then buying shares in the initial public offering. One of the firms was D.E. Shaw.

The Times does not mention it, but the firm's founder and namesake, David Shaw, is a major Democratic political donor. Federal Election Commission records show he gave $1,375,000 in 2012 to Priorities USA Action, a left-leaning group, and $450,000 to the Senate Majority Pac, another Democrat-supporting group.

If a company owned by a big Republican-leaning donor such as Sheldon Adelson or Charles and David Koch got hit with that sort of SEC action, the Times would almost certainly have made a bigger deal out of it. There's no indication that Mr. Shaw himself was involved in the trading that led to the SEC settlement (he reportedly has stepped back from money-management and now spends most of his time on the science of protein-folding and similar matters), but the firm refused to comment to the Times and the SEC documents don't name anyone, so it is not clear what individual was involved, and whether that individual had any adverse consequences for his career within the firm.

D.E. Shaw is also the firm that paid Lawrence Summers $5.2 million for a one-day-a-week job, and that has met with the SEC and written to it to try to shape the rules on short-selling.

The rules that these firms are accused of violating may or may not make sense, but either way, the whole situation seems more newsworthy, and worth more detailed investigation, than the Times devotes to it.

Today's front-page New York Times article headlined "Reaping Profit After Assisting on Health Law" is pretty much a rip-off of an article that appeared last month in a Capitol Hill newspaper, the Hill, under the headline "ObamaCare's architects reap windfall as Washington lobbyists."

The Times article gives no credit to the Hill article, even though it probably should have because it is so clearly derivative of it.

The Science Times carries a brief article under the headline "Futile Care at Life's End," about a study that appeared in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The Times reports that, "Of 1,316 patients, 123 received treatment that could [be] regarded as futile."

But if you click through to the actual study, it reports on "1136 patients." It looks like the Times inserted an error in retyping the number by transposing digits.

The only person quoted in the Times report is the senior author of the study, which makes the Times report seem more like a press release than like a news article. The news article would be better if it had included some comment from other researchers in the area who weren't involved in this particular study. The Times reporter could, for example, have called Dr. Ezra Gabbay, the lead author of a fine article on this topic that was published in 2010.

From a Times article about the return to the Harvard campus of students who had been forced to withdraw after being accused of cheating on a take-home final exam in a government class:

In late August 2012, Harvard administrators revealed that nearly half the students in a large class — identified by students as Government 1310, Introduction to Congress, with 279 students — were suspected of having cheated on a take-home final exam in May. Later, administrators said that more than half of those suspected, about 70 students, had been required to withdraw, generally for a year, retroactive to last September.
For many of those students, the start of the academic year last week meant returning to a campus that spent much of the past year debating what they did and how the university responded. Harvard, which has never said how many students were required to withdraw, also declined to say how many had re-enrolled.

Seventy is not "more than half" of 279. And doesn't the sentence that says "administrators said that more than half of those suspected, about 70 students, had been required to withdraw, generally for a year" contradict the sentence that says, "Harvard, which has never said how many students were required to withdraw"?

This isn't an issue of ideological bias, just of basic intelligibility, communication, and perhaps, math.

Over the weekend, the Times:

•Published an article on the front of its Sunday Review section likening Israel to the Soviet Union and the Apartheid-era South Africa government.

•Published an interview with the president of Barnard in which she opines, "my generation made a mistake," without reporting her age or what generation she considers herself a member of.

•Reported as an aside, low down in a column about what might be called riffraff in Union Square and with no further investigation, that "Some bodegas buy $10 in food stamps for $7 cash." This would be the sort of thing an editor who was on his or her toes might say, "forget about the riffraff in Union Square, go write a column about food-stamp fraud."

The New York Times must be worried about Politico doing to it in New York City what Politico did to the Washington Post in Washington, to judge by how the Times rushed out a dismissive article. (The Times treated the New York Sun the same way when when it launched.) Today's Times piece manages to misspell the name of a Politico reporter (The correct spelling of the name is Dylan Byers, not "Byars," as the Times has it.)

Paul Krugman's editorial page column today cheers on higher taxes: "surely this is exactly the sort of thing we should be doing: Taxing the ever-richer rich, at least a bit, to expand opportunity for the children of the less fortunate."

Fine, it's the opinion page. Check out the national news section, where the Times coverage of Texas is provided by the left-leaning non-profit news organization The Texas Tribune, and there is a column by Ross Ramsey, the executive editor of the Texas Tribune, arguing that unless Texas raises taxes, it's going to be stuck with gravel roads instead of paved roads.

I can take Professor Krugman, at least on most days, on the theory that it's the opinion page, and the Times has a couple of less-left-wing opinion page columnists to balance him out. But where's the less-left-wing non-profit that's supplying the Times national section with Texas news coverage? If it exists, it's not in the Times.