The New York Times seems to be moderating its description of the winning candidate in Iran's presidential election, Hassan Rowhani. Here's the evolution of the Times coverage:

Saturday, page one headline: "Moderate in Iranian Election Leads in Initial Returns."

Sunday, page one headline: "Iran Moderate Wins Presidency by a Large Margin."

Monday, page A6, news article:

while the election of the new president, Hassan Rowhani, a former nuclear negotiator who is considered a moderate compared with the other candidates, was greeted by some administration officials as the best of all likely outcomes, they said it did not change the fact that only the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would make the final decision about any concessions to the West.

Even so, they said they wanted to test Mr. Rowhani quickly, noting that although he argued for a moderate tone in dealing with the United States and its allies when he was a negotiator, he also boasted in 2006 that Iran had used a previous suspension of nuclear enrichment to make major strides in building its nuclear infrastructure.

From a New York Times news article on the departure of David DeVoe, the chief financial officer of News Corp.:

That split will take place on June 28, when entertainment assets like Fox News, FX and a Hollywood studio will form a new company called 21st Century Fox. Publishing units, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and HarperCollins, and a handful of Australian television assets will form a company called News Corporation.

"Entertainment assets like Fox News"?

That's just a snide, cheap-shot Times swipe at a competing news organization. At both the Times and Fox News, the news is a blend of what is important and what is entertaining. News Corp. itself does not describe Fox News as an "entertainment" asset, and there are plenty of other better ways to describe the split, such as print versus film and broadcast (with the exception of the Australian television assets), or more profitable versus less profitable.

An article in the Home section of the New York Times about a Brooklyn house owned by the musician Mike D of the Beastie Boys and his wife filmmaker Tamra Davis carries the following sentence:

Mr. Diamond, who prefers not to give his age, now has two boys of his own, Davis, 10, and Skyler, 8, with his wife, Tamra Davis, a filmmaker, who also prefers not to give her age.

Plenty of other people the Times writes about would prefer not to give their ages, but the Times either figures them out using public records and puts them in anyway, or just leaves them out rather than making a big fuss about it. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the Times gave Mr. Diamond and Ms. Davis more flexible treatment in exchange for being allowed into their house to do an article about it for the Home section.

If the paper is going to cut those kinds of deals, some more transparency would be great: "We agreed not to print the couple's ages because they threatened to kick us and our photographer out of their house if we insisted on it, and then we'd have to find some other people to write about, which would be more work."

Wikipedia says Mr. Diamond is 46.

An editorial in today's New York Times correctly faults Speaker Boehner and Senator Feinstein for characterizing Edward Snowden, the source of the Guardian and Washington Post articles about secret U.S. government data collection programs, as a traitor. The editorial says:

In the landmark 1945 case Cramer v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that one had to provide aid and comfort and also "adhere" to an enemy to be guilty of treason.

"A citizen may take actions which do aid and comfort the enemy," the court said, "making a speech critical of the government or opposing its measures, profiteering, striking in defense plants or essential work, and the hundred other things which impair our cohesion and diminish our strength — but if there is no adherence to the enemy in this, if there is no intent to betray, there is no treason."

This is a strange formulation. If the Times editorial writers are looking for a definition of treason, they need not look exclusively to that Supreme Court ruling. The Supreme Court, after all, did not invent the definition out of thin air. It comes from the Constitution, in Article III, Section 3, which states:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court

The Times article doesn't mention the Constitution at all, which is an odd omission, because treason is the only crime whose definition is given explicitly in the text of the Constitution. Maybe the editorial writer was unaware of this passage, or maybe it's a sign of the skewed way the Times views the law in this country, which is that it comes from the Supreme Court rather than from the Constitution.

A New York Times article about conservatives upset at the Department of Justice for scrutinizing journalists includes the following paragraph:

"It's a sea change, to say the least, in how it's being covered," said Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a nonprofit, liberal research organization that devotes much of its efforts to criticizing Fox News. "I can't think of a single example of Fox News ever coming to the aid of a reporter who was at the center of a national security leak," Mr. Boehlert added.

One such example that exists but that Mr. Boehlert apparently was not able to think of, and that the Times does not mention, is Judith Miller, who was at the center of a national security leak case as a reporter at the New York Times and who then became a Fox News contributor after leaving the Times.

A New York Times article about the trend of male nudity in Broadway and West End observes that the actors are becoming "eye candy for the tired businesswoman or gay man. (And don't think that producers aren't banking on the appeal to that reliable theatergoing demographic.)"

The producers "banking" on this "appeal" include not only the theater producers but, apparently, the Web producers of the New York Times, who accompany the article with a slide show headlined "A Bevy of Bare Chests."

Somehow, when Broadway producers do it, the Times critics complains that it is crass objectification that panders to certain demographics. But when the Times does the same thing, it's just covering the news, right?

The business section of today's New York Times carries an article by reporter Stephanie Clifford under the headline: "More Dissent Is in Store Over Wal-Mart Scandal." The Times reports:

Some investors also objected to the heavy presence of insider directors on the board: two Waltons, one Walton son-in-law, the chief executive and a former ex-chief executive. After the 2013 meeting, when three independent directors will step down, about 65 percent of the board will be independent.

My goodness, two Waltons and one Walton son-in-law on a 17-member board!

From the New York Times Company's own corporate governance statement:

Based on the foregoing, the Board has affirmatively determined that each of Raul E. Cesan, Robert E. Denham, Joichi Ito, James A. Kohlberg, David E. Liddle, Ellen R. Marram, Brian P. McAndrews, Thomas Middelhoff and Doreen A. Toben has no material relationships with the Company and, therefore, each is independent pursuant to applicable NYSE rules. Of the remaining directors, Michael Golden, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Mark Thompson are executive officers of the Company. Steven B. Green's wife is Mr. Sulzberger, Jr.'s sister and Mr. Golden's cousin. Carolyn D. Greenspon is the daughter of a cousin of Messrs. Sulzberger, Jr. and Golden. Due to their family relation to Messrs. Sulzberger, Jr. and Golden, Mr. Green and Ms. Greenspon are not considered independent.

In other words, the New York Times Company has four family directors — Michael Golden, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Carolyn Greenspon, and Steven Green — on its own 14-member board, and it's running front-of-the-business section articles that take seriously complaints about the presence of a mere three Walton family members on Walmart's 17 member board. The hypocrisy is staggering. The Times percentage of "independent" directors, nine of 14, is 64 percent, or less than the 65 percent that it is complaining about in the case of Walmart.

One might think that such a circumstance would cause the Times to look askance at the public-pension-fund-driven idea that an "independent director" who is paid fees for attending meetings is somehow better for a company's performance than a director who is from the family that built the company and that owns a large chunk of the company's stock. Instead the Times just parrots it without any skepticism. That would be one thing if the Times were one of the many companies run by management that owns a trivial percentage of the company. But since the Times is actually a family controlled, though publicly traded, company (albeit one that has not performed particularly well for any of its shareholders recently), readers might have hoped for a more intelligent treatment. One place to look for that is Warren Buffett's letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders for the year 2004:

Jesus understood the calibration of independence far more clearly than do the protesting institutions. In Matthew 6:21 He observed: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."… In our view, based on our considerable boardroom experience, the least independent directors are likely to be those who receive an important fraction of their annual income from the fees they receive for board service (and who hope as well to be recommended for election to other boards and thereby to boost their income further). Yet these are the very board members most often classed as 'independent.'

The New York Times obituary of Frank Lautenberg reported, "When he joined the company, he was its fifth employee. But it grew rapidly, and by 1982, when he left the company as its chief executive, it was one of the largest computer service companies in the world, with 15,000 employees." However, a 2011 obituary in the Times of Henry Taub, a founder of ADP, reported, "Senator Lautenberg left the company in 1983 after winning election to the United States Senate."

When did Lautenberg leave ADP? One article reports 1982, and the other article reports 1983. It would seem that one of the two articles should be corrected, because it's logically difficult for them both to be accurate.

A Times op-ed piece by Dara Horn blames the demise of standard transliterated spelling of Yiddish on the Nazis: "The only real difference between Webster's project and YIVO's is that, for six million devastating reasons, YIVO's failed and Webster's succeeded."

That seems to me an oversimplification. Even without the Holocaust, the number of Jews interested in reading Yiddish using English letters rather than Hebrew letters, or in reading Yiddish at all, would have diminished. American Jews just learned English, not Yiddish. Jews who went to the land of Israel learned Hebrew, not Yiddish, and if they wanted to learn Yiddish, they could have done so with Hebrew letters rather than by transliterating the Hebrew into English. And other Jews in Europe were assimilating and speaking German or Russian. So the population interested in a fastidious, standardized English transliteration of Yiddish is a small one indeed. That's not to diminish the substantial and indeed devastating role of the Holocaust on Yiddish culture, just to suggest that other trends and phenomena — Communism, Zionism, and assimilation and immigration — played roles that were also significant.

Gail Collins writes in a column in today's Times:

Nothing major is going to happen for early-childhood education without an enormous groundswell of public demand. This is a cause that's extremely popular in theory. But its advocates have no power to reward or punish. Lawmakers who labor on behalf of preschool programs may get stars in heaven, but they don't get squat in campaign contributions.

The teachers unions, who would get a huge influx of new dues-paying members with an expansion of publicly funded preschool programs, make plenty of campaign contributions, and have plenty of political power. Ms. Collins pretends that they don't exist or that they do not care about this issue, when in fact, they do.

From an article about a book by a former hedge fund employee:

"The Buy Side" is one of several titles due out this summer pegged to the extensive government insider trading investigation, a list that includes "Circle of Friends" by Charles Gasparino, a broad examination of the crackdown, and "The Billionaire's Apprentice" by Anita Raghavan, an account of the case against the former Goldman director Rajat K. Gupta. (An article about insider trading by Ms. Raghavan, an occasional contributor to The New York Times, is on DealBook.)

That last sentence makes it sound like the article is "about insider trading by Ms. Raghavan, an occasional contributor to The New York Times." It's an example of how sloppy sentence construction can lead to inaccuracy. In fact what the Times means is that "an article by Ms. Raghavan about insider trading" is on DealBook, or, as the print version of the article had it, "on Page B5." As it is, the Times is inaccurately accusing its own contributing writer of insider trading when all she's done is write an article about someone else's trading. It matters where you place that modifying phrase "by Ms. Raghavan." The phrase should be jammed right up against the word it modifies, "article," not left to float off elsewhere into the sentence dangerously near a word that it was not mean to modify, "trading."

The Times obsession with race and gender diversity crops up in some unexpected places in the paper.

Restaurant critic Pete Wells, last seen here writing about the "pleasure" of being served by "women" and "others who don't look like men of European descent," gets into it again in a three-star review of a restaurant called Carbone. He writes, "I'm not ready to play along with all of Carbone's casting decisions: currently all the captains, typically the most highly tipped employees, are men."

Where to begin? First of all, might it be possible that the restaurant employees pool and divide their tips? Second of all, as I said last time around, if there's race or sex discrimination in hiring waitstaff at Manhattan restaurants, I'm against it, and the Times should do a reported article about it. Instead, the reviewer's comment casually accuses the restaurant of discrimination without giving the management a chance to respond. Finally, as a customer, I care that the waitstaff is efficient and personable, not whether the waiters are men or women.

The "Deal Professor" column in the Times business section pulls a similar stunt, injecting racial politics into a column about James Comey's nomination as FBI director. The columnist, Steven Davidoff, writes about Mr. Comey's stint working at the Bridgwater hedge fund. He writes that the Bridgewater culture is detailed by a series of videos featuring "young, bright-faced, mostly white employees." How is it relevant to Mr. Comey's nomination that the employees in the videos are "mostly white"? Is the deal professor casually accusing Bridgewater of discrimination in hiring without allowing the company a chance to defend itself? The faculty of Moritz College of Law, where Professor Davidoff works when he's not working for the New York Times, is also mostly white. So is the student body. If there's discrimination, the Times should do a reported article directly confronting it rather than these sly asides.

As recently as 1986 the Times was publicly professing a policy that "The race, religion or ethnic background of a person in the news, under The Times's policies, may be specified only if it is pertinent to the news. And in such a case, the relevance must be demonstrated in the article." The Davidoff mention of the race of the Bridgewater employees — a group, by the way, that includes one named Parag and another named Kokoro — fails to meet the standard of that Times policy.

A Michael Powell column faulting the Archdiocese of New York for laying off teachers at Catholic schools and offering severance of either six months of health insurance or $5,000 twice refers to "University Boulevard" in the Bronx. A Smartertimes reader-community member-watchdog-participant-content co-creator in the Bronx says the correct name of the street is University Avenue. Meanwhile, Mr. Powell doesn't explore what severance the New York Times Company gave to the employees it laid off when the voluntary buyouts it offered earlier this year failed to achieve the full cost reductions necessary. That would be an interesting basis for comparison, at least.

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

From a Times book review of Jonathan Alter's The Center Holds: "It is an environment in which anti-government conservatives have faced off against the administration over health care reform, taxes and a host of other issues."

So if you oppose ObamaCare or tax increases you're "anti-government"? A lot of people who oppose ObamaCare and oppose tax increases are quite patriotic and are not anarchists. They just think government shouldn't get any bigger, or should get smaller. That doesn't necessarily make them anti-government, any more than it makes someone who prefers his steak in half-pound portions rather than one-ton portions a vegetarian.

For some reason the Times seems to find this a hard concept to grasp.

A New York Times editorial takes aim at what the newspaper calls "the harvesting of what is called nonpublic information" by "political intelligence operatives" who "make regular rounds to schmooze with well-situated acquaintances and discover what is in the works that is not yet on the public radar."

The Times asserts that "these specialists should have to register like lobbyists." The editorial concludes with a call by Congress to pass a law to "force disclosure by the information parasites living off Congress."

It seems to me that the only difference between what the Times calls "information parasites" and the reporters the Times pays to cover Congress is that the Times charges lower fees to its subscribers and has a larger number of them, while the "political intelligence operatives" have fewer customers and charge higher fees (though at the rate the Times has been raising its circulation fees, that may be a temporary distinction). If the Times is going to call for a law regulating "the harvesting of what is called nonpublic information" — also known as "reporting" — it might want to consider the First Amendment, or explain why some reporting is parasitic and requires additional regulation, while other reporting deserves First Amendment protection and the self-congratulation normally on display at journalism awards ceremonies. Otherwise people might come to the conclusion that the Times just wants a government crackdown on its competitors in the information industry.