A news article about whether the next mayor of New York will keep Michael Bloomberg's City Hall office design says Mr. Bloomberg installed "a sea of desks without walls or dividers."

In fact the photograph that runs with the article shows dividers. They are low, but they are there.

A Times editorial on President Obama's Israel speech asserts, "In recent years, Israel has built so many settlements that the options for finding a two-state solution are dwindling."

The Times gives no evidence to back up this claim, which appears predicated on the strange assumption that a Palestinian Arab state would not allow Jews to live within its borders. It also suggests, falsely, that the main obstacle to a two-state solution is Israeli settlements, rather than, say, refusal by the Palestinian Arabs to accept Israel's existence as a Jewish state.

Another sentence in the Times editorial also deals with the settlement issue: "We should note that rockets were fired from Gaza into southern Israel on Thursday — a reckless and provocative act — while the Israelis showed good faith by avoiding the sorts of defiant acts, like announcing new settlements, that have marred American visits in the past." This draws a kind of parallel between shooting rockets aimed to kill Israeli civilians and building homes for Jewish Israelis. It's a false equivalence, because one is an act of terrorism and another is something that there is nothing wrong with.

Sometimes the news is what the Times leaves out. That appears to be the case with a dispatch about what the Times describes as "steep losses" in a "social impact" fund run by the Yucaipa Companies, "the money management fund run by billionaire Ronald Burkle." (At least they didn't describe him as a reclusive billionaire.)

The Times says the fund in question was "started in 2008."

That was a period in which Bill Clinton was involved with the Yucaipa Companies. He reportedly cut his ties to the firm in early 2009, and it's not clear whether he was involved with the "social impact" fund.

But if Mr. Clinton's reported involvement helped to lure government-employee pension funds to invest with Yucaipa, and if those pension funds now have steep losses for which taxpayers may be on the hook while Mr. Clinton is off enjoying the $15.4 million he reportedly earned from Yucaipa, that might be something of interest to Times readers.

As it is, the Times Yucaipa article doesn't mention Mr. Clinton at all.

A Times column complaining about the police enforcing the laws against marijuana includes the following passage:

How much pot did Mr. Griffin have in his pocket that night?

"I had a blunt," he said.

Just one?

"Yes," he said.

How much did it cost?

"Five dollars," he said.

A blunt, or marijuana cigarette, contains about one gram of marijuana, about the weight of a dash of salt.

This is an area in which your editor has no firsthand expertise, but other reading I've done — including, say, this Times article from December 2012 — defines a blunt not as a marijuana cigarette but as "a cigar filled with marijuana."

There's a new example today of Times incompetence in coverage of the Boy Scouts of America, an organization that is culturally foreign to many Times reporters and editors. (For earlier examples, please see here and here.) A Times news article and slide show describe the singer Madonna as appearing at an event of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation in a "Boy Scouts uniform."

In fact, as People magazine more accurately reported, she was in what looked more like a Cub Scout uniform.

The photos indicate that it was a blue uniform. A Times correction February 6 described the Boy Scout uniform as "tan," which is itself inaccurate because it describes just the uniform shirt and not the olive-green pants or shorts that go with it. But if the Times reporter and editor had read their own newspaper's inaccurate correction from last month, they'd realize that Madonna was not in a Boy Scout uniform, but a Cub Scout uniform. This might seem like a fine line, since the Cub Scouts are part of the Boy Scouts of America. But it's the sort of thing that just gives away a lack of familiarity with the subject in a way that the Times would find unacceptable when writing about topics that its editorial staff is more deeply invested in, such as organic produce or yoga.

There are some other strange aspects of the Times coverage of this event in addition to the inaccurate description of the uniform. The article refers to "a nearly 20-minute rambling speech from Glaad's president, Herndon Graddick." The slideshow, on the other hand, reports that "Herndon Graddick, Glaad's president, devoted much of his 15-minute speech to raising awareness of transgender issues." So which was it, a "nearly 20-minute" speech or a "15-minute" speech?

Also left unexplained is why this fundraiser merits a section-front, 1000-word news article and a 14-slide multimedia presentation, while many other fundraising dinners happen all over New York City for other causes nearly every night of the week and are either ignored entirely or covered with a photo or two in Bill Cunningham's Sunday "Evening Hours" column.

A Times article reports that the BBC is selling the Lonely Planet travel guides to "a reclusive American billionaire," Brad M. Kelley.

"Reclusive billionaire" is one of those stereotypes that the Times likes to use even if it isn't accurate.

My authoritative Webster's Second Unabridged dictionary describes reclusive as someone living in reclusion, in "solitary confinement" or "secluded" from the world like a "monk or hermit."

But journalists now use the word to describe any rich person who doesn't drop everything and rush to the phone whenever a reporter calls. Any rich person who is any less receptive to press inquiries than Donald Trump or Senator Charles Schumer is routinely described as "reclusive," even if the person has friends and business colleagues and an active family or social life.

Other billionaires the Times has described as reclusive include Woody Johnson, Larry Ellison, Huguette Clark, Edmond Safra, Ira Rennert, Stephen Feinberg, and Steven Cohen. If you grant the Times enough interviews, it will describe you as "once-reclusive."

When people put an adjective together with a group for racial or religious groups, the Times is quick to condemn. Billionaires, though, seem to be acceptable targets for such treatment by the Times itself. When you read "reclusive billionaire," think, "lazy, biased, inaccurate journalist."

Andrew Ross Sorkin, editor of the New York Times Dealbook section, has a column in today's Times explaining, as the headline puts it, "why not to worry" about the "irrelevant" and "overblown" matter of a new tax on bank accounts in Cyprus. The continuation of his column appears in the printed paper beneath the continuation (or "jump") of a top-of-the-front-page news article to which seven Times reporters are named contributors. The Times also carries an editorial warning that the tax "could do lasting damage to confidence in banks in other euro-zone countries in financial crisis." Either Mr. Sorkin is correct or the editorial writer and the editor who assigned seven reporters and put the news on the top of the front page are correct. But they can't both be correct, because the stories they tell are at odds.

A front-page Times article about efforts by scientists to revive extinct species refers to "a weird frog, the Southern gastric brooding frog, that went extinct about a quarter century ago." The article doesn't explain what is weird about the frog. Frogs probably think New York Times reporters are weird, and if you are a Southern gastric brooding frog, you probably think other kinds of frogs are weird. This is another example of the Times not just reporting the news but instructing readers about how we are supposed to feel about it. Weird.

A book review by Michiko Kakutani of a new book by Zev Chafets about Roger Ailes avers "There is little cogent analysis in these pages about how Fox News frames its reports from a conservative point of view, or the effect that this has had on the national conversation."

Likewise there is little cogent analysis — or even self-awareness — by the New York Times about how the Times frames its reports from a left-wing point of view, or the effect that that has on the national conversation.

An editorial in today's New York Times takes a skeptical approach toward the Food and Drug Administration's plans to ease the approval requirements for Alzheimer's drugs. The editorial warns "the proposal raises troubling questions as to whether the agency would end up approving drugs that provide little or no clinical benefit yet cause harmful side effects in people who take the medications for extended periods." The editorial goes on to say that "Even if drugs are eventually approved under this new approach, it will be imperative to force manufacturers to conduct follow-up studies, as required by law, to see if patients benefit in the long run."

Contrast the Times's cautious approach to Alzheimer's medication with its enthusiasm for medical marijuana, which the Times editorialists have recently been urging Governors Christie and Cuomo to dispense in New Jersey and New York despite the FDA's position that marijuana is not medicine and that the medical benefits of it haven't been shown to outweigh the potential risks.

The editorial on Alzheimer's drugs doesn't mention marijuana, but it lays the groundwork for a potential distinction in some phrases about how the early-stage Alzheimer's patients are "still healthy," while some of the medical marijuana patients may have cancer and thus not meet the Times standard of being "still healthy."

It's a fine enough distinction to raise the suspicion that's what's really driving these editorial positions isn't some finely calibrated or carefully thought out philosophy or system of medical ethics, but a reflexive opposition to the pharmaceutical industry and support for government regulation (on the Alzheimer's drugs) combined with a kind of warm Baby Boom generation counterculture hazy friendliness toward marijuana.

Paul Krugman has a column under the headline "Marches of Folly" that likens concern about the deficit to the concern about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (a concern he claims was unwarranted). He acknowledges, "I don't want to push the analogy too far...these days dissenters don't operate in the atmosphere of menace, the sense that raising doubts could have devastating personal and career consequences, that was so pervasive in 2002 and 2003."

If opponents of the Iraq War did indeed fear devastating personal and career consequences, those fears were as baseless as Professor Krugman thinks the concerns about the deficit and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were. After all, Paul Krugman went on to win the Nobel Prize; Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, and Valerie Plame Wilson got a reported $2.5 million book deal and a Hollywood movie made about her. Yet somehow in the case of the Iraq War opponents, having had the unwarranted fears of devastating consequences is a sign of being admirable, yet the the case of the Iraq War advocates and deficit hawks, having had the supposedly unwarranted fears is a sign of being a fool.

A book review in today's New York Times offers a less than glowing assessment of Times reporter Michael Moss's book Salt Sugar Fat. The reviewer calls the book "a bit wearying," says "this is not a new story," and faults him for failing to consider "the ferment now bubbling away in America's food culture," such as "the boom in farmer's markets, the elevation of the chef, the proliferation of urban food trucks, the return of the artisan, the growth of craft beer at the expense of big corporate brewing, the admittedly high-end but notable success of Whole Foods, even the appearance of oatmeal and better coffee in McDonald's, not to mention the appearance of healthy grains and nonfat Greek yogurts and myriad global-pantry products on Wal-Mart's shelves."

The review concludes, "Moss's book is a little like a plate of processed cheese: fresh, in its way, but behind the culinary curve." Ouch.

The review can't be much consolation to Times readers who were served this "processed cheese" — an article adapted from the book — as the cover story in the February 24 New York Times Magazine. The next time the Times plans to serve up some wearying, not new, behind the curve journalism, it might want to warn readers before the fact, not three weeks afterward. That way readers can spend their time doing something else instead.

Support higher taxes as a Republican state senator and get rewarded with an admiring New York Times profile about your "courage." The article buys into the false dichotomy: "He has never been shy about discussing his preference for raising taxes over increasing public bond debt." It's as if the only choices are borrow or tax. What about spend less, or let the private sector rather than government handle it?

The Times's coverage of this is supplied by "the Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization," which, like so many non-profit (and therefore tax exempt) organizations, is only too happy to cheer on the politicians who support raising taxes on the people and organizations that do pay taxes.

A front-page article in today's Times appears under the headline, "G.O.P. Divided On Proper Role For U.S. Abroad."

"Republicans divided" is one of the Times' favorite themes, and, though I haven't made a formal study of it, it seems a story that gets written up more often than the story of the no-less-divided Democrats. But the main point here isn't so much the disparate treatment of Democrats and Republicans, but the language that the Times uses to describe the divide.

The article begins, "For more than three decades, the Republican Party brand has been deeply tied to a worldview in which the aggressive use of American power abroad is both a policy imperative and a political advantage."

A smarter editor would have deleted the word "brand," which is unnecessary. But the real problem word in the sentence is "aggressive." It recurs in the article as a straw-man shorthand description of the foreign policy about which the Republicans are supposedly newly divided. Senator McCain, for example, is described as "his party's most prominent spokesman for an aggressive foreign policy."

But the word "aggressive" may mean, or at least connote, tending to commit unprovoked acts of hostility. That's a tendentious and not necessarily accurate description of a Republican foreign policy of peace through strength, or of robust, bold support for freedom and democracy abroad, or of rolling back the Soviet empire and taking the fight against Islamist extremist terrorism to the ground of our enemies. In other words, in the face of an expansionist, sinister Soviet Communist empire and an Islamist terrorist network that attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and wants to reestablish a caliphate in Europe, a firm and activist, even interventionist, foreign policy isn't "aggressive," it's defensive.

The Times's choice of language to cover this story about "G.O.P Divided," in other words, gives a strong clue about which side of the divide the Times itself is on.

Sometimes with the Times the problem isn't so much bias but carelessness verging on incompetence. An example is in an article today about the lawyer Robert Morgenthau. It already has a correction appended stating, "An earlier version of this article's Web summary misspelled the surname of its subject. He is Robert M. Morgenthau, not Morganthau." Yet uncorrected (at least at this hour) is the assertion that Mr. Morgenthau is "now with the firm Wachtel, Lipton, Rosen & Katz." The correct spelling is Wachtell. So here the Times manages to do an article on Mr. Morgenthau and misspell both Mr. Morgenthau's name (at least in an early version of the Web summary) and the name of his law firm. Nobody's perfect (including Smartertimes), and the Times often corrects its errors, which is more than some other professions do, but even acknowledging those points, this seems a bit of a disappointing performance, spelling-wise. And if they can't get the basic stuff right, like spelling names, it raises doubts about whether they can get the more complicated stuff, like the details of decades-old murder cases or international conflicts, right.