Of the 200 people featured in the New York Times's "Sunday Routine" column so far, 24 mention going to church. Four times as many mention exercising, and five times as many work.

Reliable estimates of New Yorkers' church-going habits are hard to come by, but several suggest church-going in 21st-century New York is not as unusual as the Times "Sunday Routine" column describes it. In 2011, the evangelical pollster George Barna found that 46% of New York City-area residents participated in some kind of "weekly religious event." The latest Encyclopedia of New York City catalogs 3,761 houses of worship in the city.

A Pew Forum report in 2009 found that 32% of New York state residents attend weekly services. Gallup finds New York state numbers slightly higher, and puts church attendance in New Jersey and Connecticut at 38% and 32%, respectively. Americans do have a habit of exaggerating their church attendance. But even if all those numbers skew higher than the population of New York City, Sunday Routine, which appears Sunday in the Times' Metropolitan section, is one corner of the city in which the scarcity of church-goers is notable.

The column's concept is simple: Each week, one person, or occasionally a couple, recounts their average Sunday from morning until bedtime. Often they discuss their meals, exercise habits, and favorite TV shows ("60 Minutes" looms large), and sometimes more unusual activities, like wig repair (Wendy Williams) or cruising around in a Lamborghini (telemarketing executive A.J. Khubani). Though most subjects are well-known or influential in some way, the column has also featured a Zamboni driver at Rockefeller Center, a Salvation Army volunteer, and a high-school student—"interesting New Yorkers," as Metropolitan editor Amy Virshup put it an email.

Sunday Routine first appeared on May 29, 2009, with an account of how the city's parks and recreation commissioner, Adrian Benepe, spends his day. Benepe's entry set the tone for the next 193-and-counting columns. He praised Central Park. He mentioned the newspaper. He said he gets "some extended vigorous exercise."

What he does not mention is going to church or performing any other religious activities. In combing through every single Sunday Routine column since its start, in fact, I found that just 42 of 200 subjects (21%) mention performing any kind of religious or spiritual activity as part of a typical Sunday.

Here I should say that I interpreted "religious activity" liberally, giving folk singer Pete Seeger credit for saying that "every time I'm in the woods I feel like I'm in church." I counted the president of the board of directors of the 92nd Street Y, Thomas Kaplan, for mentioning his children's Bible tutor, though he didn't seem to perform any Bible-related activities himself. I allowed meditation, a pagan "morning ritual by the sea," and Good Morning America co-host Robin Roberts, who said she makes time for personal devotions. I was less generous with conservative commentator S.E. Cupp, who said that "as an atheist, maybe Nascar is my church?" I wavered over choreographer Mark Morris, who said "Sunday is a day of rest," but ultimately put him in the "no" column.

When I looked over the religious group more critically to see how many were performing traditional religious rituals for personal (not professional) reasons, the already-small number shrank. Omitting the vague meditators (I allowed transcendental meditation devotee Russell Simmons), woods-wandering Seeger, and all the politicians who mentioned attending church services just to meet constituents, I was left with just 32 subjects. When I narrowed even more ruthlessly to find people who attended a Christian church service, the number shrunk to 24. That means that according to the Times, just 12% of "interesting New Yorkers" go to church on a typical Sunday. (Obviously, not all New Yorkers are even culturally Christian; notably, more than 1 million are Jewish and may have celebrated the Sabbath the day before, although Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, for example, mentioned praying on Sunday.)

Peter Steinfels, who wrote a religion column called Beliefs for the Times for 20 years, picked up on the relative godlessness of the Sunday Routine class in a blog post at Commonweal last spring. Steinfels posted an email from former Newsweek religion writer Kenneth Woodward, who noted the paucity of church-going in the column, and asked, "are prominent New Yorkers not likely to be the kind of folks who worship God on Sunday? Or does the choice of whom to feature in 'Sunday Routine' say something about the culture of the people and paper doing the selecting? Is it the mirror or the lamp?" It's worth noting that Beliefs was born when Steinfels, a practicing Catholic, wrote a memo in 1990 observing that "Nowhere in the paper was there a regular treatment of religion for readers with a special interest in the topic, as there was, obviously, for business and sports, but also for science, art, architecture and many other subjects."

The church-going club of Sunday Routine subjects includes the Rev. Al Sharpton, Newark mayor Cory Booker, actresses Kristin Chenoweth and Vanessa Williams, historian Annette Gordon-Reed, NYU president John Sexton, New York City Road Runners Club president Mary Wittenberg, and Republican congressman Michael Grimm. Still, it's a small club.

I asked Ms. Virshup whether she considers religious diversity in choosing subjects for the column, and whether the relative lack of it is a problem. "We strive for all kinds of diversity, including where people live, their race, gender, professions, etc.," she wrote. "We don't necessarily look for people from different religions, and with most people, we have no idea what religion they follow (if any) or if they are observant until we do the interview, though we do sometimes tie a Routine to a religious holiday, in which case that's the point. For example, we did David Posner, the chief rabbi of Temple Emanu-El for the High Holy Days."

If church-going is not part of a typical New York City Sunday, then what are the rituals that have taken its place? Exercise is one Sunday fixture; just more than half of all subjects mentioned fitting in a trip to the gym, a yoga class, a jog, or some other calorie-burning activity. About a third mentioned pet care, usually dog-walking, though 10 mentioned birds. (Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz calls his parrot, Beep, his "son," and Christie Brinkley's perches on her shoulder as she sips her morning coffee.) A few others themes emerge: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, football, a phone call to one's parents, and Italian food, to name a few. And as it turns out, executive editor Jill Abramson was prescient when she said in 2011 that "In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion": Almost four in 10 Sunday Routine subjects mention reading the paper.

Thirty-nine subjects have second homes in which to perform these rituals of relaxation. Read in quick succession, and you can detect a kind of poetry of the elite: "TriBeCa; Southampton; Aspen, Colo.; and Los Angeles" (Jason Binn); "The couple also have a 1906 cottage in Cragsmoor, in the Catskills" (Kent Tritle); "Vienna; St. Petersburg, Russia; and an apartment on the Upper West Side" (Anna Netrebko); "the couple also have apartments in New York and Paris" (Ina Garten).

As for primary residences, three subjects live in the Bronx, four in Staten Island, 10 in Queens, 27 in Brooklyn, and 130 in Manhattan -- 32 on the Upper West Side alone. Ms. Virshup acknowledged the column is heavy on Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, and said editors are "always striving to find people from different neighborhoods, though we don't have quotas."

Besides drinking coffee, the most popular form of worship in Sunday Routine's New York is work. Over and over, subjects say they devote time to their jobs on Sundays. Biographer Robert Caro puts on a suit and tie and heads in to his office on 57th Street; dozens of others mention tending to email, conference calls, or popping by the museums or restaurants they run. All told, more than 60% of the column's subjects mention working on the Christian day of rest. "Sunday is a phenomenal day for work," architect Rafael Viñoly said when he was featured in 2011. "Disgusting, right?" Viñoly has homes in TriBeCa, Water Mill, N.Y., and London; in response to an inquiry, he described himself as, "Atheist 100%."

The New York Times Company announced Wednesday that it had hired an investment banker, Evercore Partners, to try to sell its New England Media Group, which includes the Boston Globe. Here, in alphabetical order, are 25 potential buyers of the Boston Globe, arranged alphabetically, with some thoughts about why each would or wouldn't be interested.

Mike Barnicle's column ran in the Globe from 1973 to 1998, and he was personally identified with the paper and the city in ways that most contemporary newspaper columnists can only aspire to. Has potential access to capital via his wife, Anne Finucane, a senior Bank of America executive. For him, it would be a triumphant return to the Globe after a difficult parting. But he's got little history as either a deal-maker or an operating newspaper executive, so his involvement would likely be as part of some team with a wider array of skills and resources.

Block Communications owns the Toledo Blade and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, which employs, in executive editor David Shribman, someone who would make a very good editor of the Boston Globe. Alas, the Blocks seem to have their hands full in Toledo and Pittsburgh and don't have the New England ties that Mr. Shribman does, so this one seems like a long shot.

Warren Buffett/Berkshire Hathaway: Mr. Buffett, 82, got early exposure to capitalism as a youth running newspaper delivery routes in Washington, D.C. His Berkshire Hathaway has long owned the Buffalo News and invested in the Washington Post Company, where Mr. Buffett for some time served on the board. More recently, he paid a reported $200 million for the Omaha World-Herald, and he's also snapped up the Greensboro, N.C., News & Record and the Richmond, Va. Times-Dispatch. Mr. Buffett is the sort of deep-pocketed buyer the Times would love to sell to. Mr. Buffett doesn't have strong Massachusetts ties the way he does in Omaha or Washington, though the holding company Berkshire Hathaway did start out as a New Bedford, Mass., textile manufacturer.

Comcast/NECN: Cable television companies have sometimes seen newspapers as strategic acquisitions. On New York's Long Island, Cablevision bought the newspaper Newsday. The Comcast cable company operates the New England Cable News channel, which would have some synergies with the Globe news operation, and CEO Brian Roberts, though based in Philadelphia, has a place on Martha's Vineyard. Comcast has done media acquisitions in the past with NBC and Daily Candy. The NBC affiliate in Boston, channel 7, is owned by Sunbeam Television, which probably means there'd be no cross-ownership problem with the Globe and NBC.

Jack Connors: A founder of the Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos advertising agency, Mr. Connors stepped down last year as chairman of the board of Partners HealthCare System, which includes some of Boston's biggest and best hospitals. Like Mr. Barnicle, he's pushing 70. A lengthy Boston Globe profile in 2007 put his fortune at $500 million and said he had "tried and failed (for now) to buy this newspaper from the New York Times Co."

ESPN/Disney: Some large part of the value of the Globe is its sports coverage, which Boston's rabid Celtics, Red Sox, and Patriots fans consume along with their morning Dunkin Donuts. ESPN, which hired Globe baseball writer Peter Gammons (who eventually moved on) and then Globe basketball writer Jackie MacMullan, could buy the Globe sports section and then sell the rest of the paper on to some other buyer. The FCC cross-ownership restrictions would probably not apply because though ESPN parent Disney has an ABC affiliate in Boston, channel 5, that station is owned by Hearst.

Gatehouse Media owns a bunch of small dailies, weeklies, and Web sites in the cities and towns surrounding Boston. But with its stock trading in the pennies, it's not at all clear that the company has the balance sheet to complete an acquisition the size of the Globe.

Donald Graham/The Washington Post Company: Mr. Graham just hired Marty Baron, the former Globe editor who knows as much about the paper and its operations as anyone. And rescuing the Globe from the Times and making a success of it would be a good way for Mr. Graham to get a kind of revenge on Arthur Sulzberger Jr. for wresting away the International Herald Tribune, which the Times and Post companies had run as a partnership. Even so, the Post Company has its hands full with its newspaper in Washington, and Mr. Graham's sale of Newsweek shows he has no sentimentality about letting go of properties with little in the way of future growth prospects.

John Henry: A stake in the Boston Red Sox and its associated sports cable channel was part of the Times Company's Boston operation for some time. If Mr. Henry, who owns the Red Sox as part of a broader group, bought the Globe, it would reunite the newspaper with the sports operation. The rationale here is similar to the idea of selling the Globe to ESPN; a large part of the value is the sports coverage, and the advertisers who want to buy signs at Fenway Park or television commercials during Red Sox games are presumably the same ones who would want to reach Globe readers. On the other hand, other than the sports network that covers the Red Sox, he doesn't have much in the way of experience in the news business.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Pearson, the big education company, owns the Financial Times; the Washington Post Company, another big education company (via its Kaplan unit) owns the Post; why shouldn't HMH, another big education company, based in Boston (and, disclosure, the publisher of my forthcoming book) buy the Globe? There's plenty of overlap; the Globe photo archives could be useful to HMH, and the Globe recently excerpted an HMH-published book by former Red Sox manager Terry Francona.

Chris Hughes: The Harvard-educated Facebook co-founder bought The New Republic; he could probably get more clout with the Globe, which has some significant circulation in New Hampshire, an early presidential primary state.

Abigail Johnson, with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $11.8 billion, could certainly afford to buy the Globe. She and her family owns and run the Fidelity mutual fund empire. They were in the Boston-area suburban newspaper business at one time, but got out of it.

Seth Klarman, who manages money at the Boston-based Baupost Group hedge fund, could also probably afford to buy the Globe; the 2011 tax return of his family foundation shows he donated $50 million that year. He's invested in the news business recently, serving as chairman of the Times of Israel, an English language, Web-only newspaper covering the Jewish state.

Aaron Kushner launched a well-publicized effort to buy the Globe a few years ago but wound up buying the Orange County, Calif., Register instead. Trying to turn around both papers at the same time would probably be a bigger financing and managerial challenge than Mr. Kushner can handle, and if the Times Company wanted to sell to him, it probably would have done so already.

Jared Kushner started in the real estate business fixing up properties in Somerville while he was a student at Harvard; now he's also in the newspaper business as the owner of the New York Observer. He might have the right combination of money, optimism, and hubris to be a bidder, though it's not clear that he has much interest in getting involved in a big project outside his New York-area base.

Rupert Murdoch/News Corp.: The press has been full of speculation that Mr. Murdoch's new print-centric publishing spinoff (the Fox part of the business is in a different company) would buy the Chicago Tribune or the Los Angeles Times. Mr. Murdoch's Dow Jones already owns a bunch of Boston-area newspapers, including the Cape Cod Times, the Portsmouth (N.H.) Herald, and the New Bedford Standard-Times. The Globe would be a great fit, but he'd probably have to overpay to overcome the Times' resistance to selling to a competitor they dislike and ideologically differ with. Here the FCC's cross-ownership rules are again an issue; News Corp. does own the Fox affiliate in Boston, channel 25, and it was Ted Kennedy who forced Mr. Murdoch to sell the Boston Herald. So there's a long history.

Martin Peretz: The former editor-in-chief and owner of the New Republic recently took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to voice his displeasure at the direction the new management has taken the magazine. Mr. Peretz has roots on Cape Cod and in Cambridge and has written articles taking issue with the Globe's coverage of Israel. Like Mr. Barnicle, he'd be more likely to emerge as part of a group than as a sole proprietor.

Russel Pergament: The energetic entrepreneur who founded AM New York, a free tabloid, and the Tab chain of weeklies covering the Boston suburbs, Mr. Pergament isn't a household name like Mr. Buffett or Mr. Murdoch, but if you were buying the Globe and wanted a business-side success, you'd want him on your team, or at least, not competing with you.

Patrick Purcell/Boston Herald: Mr. Purcell has close relations with Mr. Murdoch. Lots of two-newspaper towns have become one-newspaper towns over the past few decades, though in Boston, the existence of the Herald hasn't really prevented the Globe from raising prices. It'd be odd for the Globe to be bought by its smaller, politically conservative tabloid rival — as if the New York Post bought the New York Times. But because the Globe has a contract to print and distribute the Herald, Mr. Purcell has a stake in how all this shakes out.

Sumner Redstone/CBS: Mr. Redstone has Boston roots, and the CBS-owned-and-operated station in Boston, channel 4, already has a partnership with the Globe. Again, those FCC media cross-ownership regulations come into play.

Mitt Romney: As a turnaround expert at Bain Capital, Mr. Romney has some experience in situations like the Globe. And surely he'd get a kick out of being the new boss of all those political reporters who were sniping at him when he was campaigning. He probably has the money, or the ability to raise it. But as in the case of a potential bid from Mr. Murdoch , the Sulzberger family might prefer a lower bid from a more ideologically acceptable buyer, if the non-family shareholders or directors don't try to force the issue.

Randall Smith/Alden Global Capital: A hedge fund with a track record of buying up newspapers at bottom-feeder prices, these guys would be interested, but maybe not at the price that the Times Company wants to get.

Taylor Family: This is the family that owned and managed the Globe before selling it to the Times Company. Cousins Stephen and Benjamin Taylor are the key figures and have been involved with prior unsuccessful efforts to buy back the Globe in partnership with other investors.

Jack Welch: The former GE CEO was reportedly involved in a 2006 effort to buy the Globe along with Mr. Barnicle and Mr. Connors. His Twitter feed discloses him to still have a lively interest in Boston's sports teams. He's 77 and spends a lot of time in New York. He might be a minority partner, but it's hard to see him leading an effort to buy the Globe.

Mortimer Zuckerman: The owner of the New York Daily News runs a real estate empire called Boston Properties. The strengths of his U.S. News magazine are an annual college rating issue (and associated Web site) and an annual hospital rating issue (and associated Web site). Both the education and health care issues play to beats that are historically strengths of the Globe and of the Boston region. This is an intriguing possibility, and though Mr. Zuckerman isn't going to get in a bidding war with Warren Buffett, it's easy to see some kind of trade in which Mr. Murdoch gets the Daily News to combine with the New York Post, while Mr. Zuckerman gets the Boston Globe to combine with the Herald and the papers in Cape Cod, Portsmouth N.H., and New Bedford. If the federal government complains on antitrust grounds, Messrs. Zuckerman, Murdoch, and Sulzberger can all say that at least the deal doesn't violate the FCC's cross-ownership restrictions, which forced them into it.

Whoever ends up buying the Globe will have a heck of a story to cover. John Kerry is secretary of state, Elizabeth Warren is the junior senator, a new mayor will eventually replace Tom Menino, and the 2016 New Hampshire primary campaign unfolds just over the border. The state is at the forefront of the health and education costs that are challenging family budgets and the national budget. Maybe, after reviewing the bids, the Sulzberger family will decide to do what it did the last time around, and hold on to the thing.

I'm an interested party as an online reader of the Globe and as someone who grew up in Massachusetts and still has family ties there. If I had the $150 million or $300 million that the Times company probably wants to part with the asset, I'd rather spend it on starting and building a new Web site than on purchasing some legacy print news operation and its associated union contracts. On the other hand, I've also learned from experience that starting something new, even with a lot of money, can be hard. And anyway, that's why the bankers at Evercore get paid those big fees, to talk buyers into paying more than they should.

"A good tax policy obeys the broad principles developed by fiscal experts over the years—for example, neutrality between alternative investments, low marginal rates, and minimal discrimination between current and future consumption." — Paul Krugman.

"The simple fact is that governments have a terrible track record at judging which industries are likely to be important. At various times governments have been convinced that steel, nuclear power, synthetic fuels, semi-conductor memories, and fifth-generation computers were the wave of the future…Of course, businesses make mistakes, too, but they do not have the extraordinarily low batting average of government because great business leaders have a detailed knowledge of and feel for their industries that nobody—no matter how smart—can have for a system as complex as a national economy." — Paul Krugman

The February issue of the American Spectator carries my article about New York Times columnist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman. Please check it out here.

Often a holiday weekend finds editors scraping the bottom of the barrel to find stories that were reported some time ago but have been holding because either they weren't particularly good or weren't particularly urgent. Today the Times metro section brings us the news that "New York Parks In Less Affluent Areas Lack Big Gifts." Bloomberg News wrote the same story back in October, and the same comments apply.

Leave it to the New York Times to turn a book review of a biography of Calvin Coolidge (Coolidge, by Amity Shlaes, who is a friend of mine) into an attack on President Reagan, but sure enough, toward the end of Jacob Heilbrunn's review of the book comes this: "The bogus nostrums that Coolidge touted have directly led either to enormous deficits during the Reagan era or to outright catastrophe during the Bush era."

Hmm. Let's look at those "enormous deficits" of the Reagan era. According to the White House Office of Management and Budget, they looked like this:

Year	Deficit in Current Dollars	Deficit as Percent of GDP
1981	79 billion	2.6
1982	128 billion	4.0
1983	208 billion	6.0
1984	185 billion	4.8
1985	212 billion	5.1
1986	221 billion	5.0
1987	150 billion	3.2
1988	155 billion	3.1

Were those deficits the result of President Reagan following Coolidge's practice of cutting tax rates? No; in fact federal tax receipts grew under the Reagan administration, to $909 billion in 1988 from $599 billion in 1981. The big driver of the deficit under Reagan wasn't tax cuts, which if anything by spawning growth helped reduce the deficit; the big driver of the deficit under Reagan was defense spending, which nearly doubled to $290 billion in 1988 from $158 billion in 1981 (it had been $134 billion in 1980). That was a bet on winning the Cold War that ultimately paid off in a big way, but that has next to nothing to do with Coolidge. Reagan could have had a zero deficit in his final year had he simply kept defense spending at Carter levels.

Meanwhile, let's have a look, for comparison's sake, at the deficits under President Obama, as reported by the same source, the White House Office of Management and Budget:

Year	Deficit in Current Dollars	Deficit as a Percent of GDP
2009	$1.4 trillion	10.1
2010	$1.3 trillion	9.0
2011	$1.3 trillion	8.7

Funny how you don't often see the Times referring to Mr. Obama's deficits as "enormous." Yet both in current dollars and as a percent of GDP, they are considerably larger than those of the Reagan administration. At least the Times hasn't yet found a way to blame the current deficits on President Coolidge.

An editorial in today's New York Times discusses the "disturbing reality" that handguns make suicide easier. "Firearms are a far more lethal means of suicide than other options. They are fatally effective in 85 percent of cases, while pill overdoses succeed only 2 percent of the time, according to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center," the Times frets. "More precaution is certainly needed…. Along with more effective controls at the federal level, individual owners must institute foolproof controls at home if some of their most vulnerable loved ones are not to be left open to self-destruction."

Elsewhere in today's Times, a news article headlined "Vermont: Senate Advances Bill for Cases in Which Patients Choose to End Lives," begins: "The State Senate gave final approval on Thursday to a measure that would exempt doctors from criminal or civil liability when treating terminally ill patients who choose to end their lives. Any person present during the self-administration of a lethal dose of legally prescribed medication would also be exempted. The legislation, known as a 'death with dignity' measure..."

There's no editorial in the Times condemning the Vermont bill, and in fact, back in 2006, a Times editorial headlined "The Assisted-Suicide Decision" praised similar legislation enacted in Oregon as a "pioneering effort to let terminally ill patients end their own lives humanely." The 2006 editorial criticized opposition to the Oregon law by saying the opponents were attempting to impose "religiously conservative ideology."

Well, no matter what one's view of religiously conservative ideology is, the Times' treatment of this one sure distills secular left-wing ideology to a pure hypocrisy, in which suicide with a gun is bad, but suicide with "a lethal dose of legally prescribed medication" is humane and pioneering. It's clear that what really bothers the Times isn't suicide, but guns, and that the suicide argument isn't really being made out of any principled opposition to suicide, but is just another way for the Times to go after guns.

Today's New York Times mentions the following non-profit organizations:

• "The National Employment Law Project, an employment-rights advocacy group," in this article

•"the Brookings Institution" and "the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research organization" in this article

•the American Civil Liberties Union in New Jersey, in this article

•the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, a research and advocacy group, in this article

The Times refers to not a single one of these groups as having "secret donors" or being "anonymously financed." Those terms are reserved for describing non-profit groups that the Times dislikes, such as the ones opposing the nomination of Senator Hagel to be secretary of defense.

It's hard to see this as anything but an example of bias. Either the anonymously financed nature of a group is worth mentioning, or it isn't. Instead what the Times seems to do is mention it for groups the Times opposes, but leave it unmentioned for groups the Times supports.

The Times' bias and double standards in connection with its news coverage of the Hagel nomination are also on display in an article in today's paper about the nomination. The article contains this passage:

"There's nothing unusual about this," said Senator James M. Inhofe, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, who on Tuesday suggested without evidence that Mr. Hagel was "cozy" with Iran, an accusation that caused the committee meeting to erupt with Democratic outrage.

The "without evidence" is an an editorial comment by the New York Times that is unwarranted. Compare it to how the Times handles a claim by an Obama economic adviser in an article elsewhere in today's paper:

Even the return of manufacturing jobs shows some evidence of tailing off. The Labor Department said employment in the sector was flat in January and essentially unchanged since July.

Mr. Furman said the leveling-out reflected depressed growth rates in Europe because of the euro crisis, which hurt American exports, as well as uncertainties over the fiscal negotiations at the end of 2012. Both of these, he said, were only temporary brakes.

There's no "Mr. Furman said without evidence" or "Both of these, he said without evidence," even though Mr. Furman's claim doesn't make much sense as an explanation of the January statistics, because the "uncertainties" were resolved at the beginning of the month, and because an article elsewhere in today's Times describes the slowdown as the result not of either uncertainty or Europe, but rather the fact that "the expiration of a two-percentage-point payroll tax cut on Jan. 1 and higher tax rates for wealthier Americans were weighing on the economy."

The Times article on Mr. Hagel today is further flawed by a passage that says: "many Republicans still nurse a grievance against Mr. Hagel for his opposition to the war in Iraq, and others have sought to make an issue of statements he has made on Israel and Iran." This ignored the fact that Mr. Hagel voted for the war in Iraq, and the language of "nurse a grievance" and "sought to make an issue" suggests that the opposition is somehow not justified. One issue that 26 senators in a letter have raised as an obstacle to Mr. Hagel's confirmation, his refusal to disclose the donors to organizations he was affiliated with, goes unmentioned by the Times again in today's article, yet another example of how the Times' interest in the anonymously financed nature of nonprofit organizations is highly selective.

A news article about President Obama's proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour from $7.25 an hour reports, "In his 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama proposed lifting the minimum wage yet higher, to $9.50."

That's fine context, but it also raises the question of what Mr. Obama said about the minimum wage in the 2012 presidential campaign. I sure watched a lot of Mr. Obama in the presidential debates and at the Democratic National Convention, and I've got to tell you I sure don't recall him emphasizing or even mentioning a $9 an hour minimum wage. Maybe I missed it, but in any event, it would have been some useful context for the Times to have included here, perhaps even more relevant than the background about the 2008 campaign.

A "Washington Memo" about President Obama reports, "With the crisis that defined his first term behind him, and the economy growing, if slowly, the legacy-minded Mr. Obama seems almost liberated at being given more time for unfinished business like immigration and climate change, and new issues like gun safety, say those who have met with him."

It's interesting to see the Times declare that the economy is "growing." The Commerce Department's report for fourth quarter 2012 GDP was that, in real terms, the economy was shrinking. Maybe the Times has a scoop on some upcoming revision to that GDP data, or it has a scoop on the first quarter 2013 data, but if it does, you'd think that would be the headline rather than a throwaway phrase in a "Washington Memo."

Anyway, it's hard to imagine that if it were a Republican president who had just turned in a quarter of negative GDP growth, the Times would be so blithely assuring readers that the economy is growing.

Writing for the Web site Mediaite, a New York-based internist, Dr. George Lombardi, reports on a patient who died of prostate cancer after refusing a PSA test after reading a New York Times article about how they are unnecessary. "My father was killed by the New York Times," his daughter said after the funeral.

The Mediaite article doesn't link to the killer New York Times articles, but here is one example of Times reporting dismissing the value of PSA tests: "Prostate Test Found To Save Few Lives," by Gina Kolata, March 18, 2009. A more balanced treatment is Tara Parker-Pope's "Answering Questions About the P.S.A. Test," October 6, 2011.

A Times editorial on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau states, "Other bank regulators, like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, are not subject to the appropriations process, as a shield against political interference."

Republicans want to make the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau subject to the congressional appropriations process; the Times and the Obama administration want to keep it insulated.

As an argument in favor of "a shield against political interference," the example of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency seems a strange one for the Times to bring up. Times columnist Joe Nocera wrote the other day that calling the OCC a regulator is "almost laughable." Instead, he described it as "a coddler, a protector, an outright enabler of the institutions it oversees."

Anyway, if shielding government agencies from "political interference" is such a good idea, why not eliminate Congress altogether, and turn the whole government over to a permanent bipartisan commission led by Kenneth Feinberg and Pete Peterson? Thing of all the money we could save on elections.

There are other words for "political interference." They include "democracy," and "constitutional checks and balances" and "accountability."

Imagine how the Times would react if a Republican president were in office and the Democrats controlled Congress and the Republican president wanted to establish some anti-abortion or pro-gun agency with funding "not subject to the appropriations process, as a shield against political interference." The Times, rightfully, would be apoplectic about an executive branch effort to evade the constitutional checks and balances.

A front-page Times article about young people trending toward the left politically includes the following passage:

On a central philosophical question of the day — the size and scope of the federal government — a clear majority of young people embraces President Obama's notion that it can be a constructive force, a point he intends to make in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.

"Young people absolutely believe that there's a role for government," said Matt Singer, a founder of Forward Montana, a left-leaning though officially nonpartisan group that seeks to engage young people in politics.

This is ridiculous. Plenty of conservatives believe the federal government "can be a constructive force." I think the federal government was a constructive force when it won World War II and the Cold War, when President Reagan broke the air traffic controller's strike, and when the Supreme Court issued the Citizens United ruling striking down limits on political speech. Not just conservatives, even libertarians believe "there's a role for government." Most libertarians would support the role of government in national defense, in law enforcement (prosecuting murders and robbers and arresting them), in fraud protection, and in dispute resolution (courts). Those who believe there's no role for government are anarchists, and they represent an extremely tiny portion of the American political spectrum.

In other words, the phrases that "the federal government...can be a constructive force" and "there's a role for government" might be embraced by an arch-conservative who favored the Iraq War, an electric fence along the U.S.-Mexican border, and a federally imposed ban on all abortions and embryonic stem cell research just as much as they might be embraced by a left-winger who favors increased taxation and increased welfare spending. The phrases are caricatures of what conservatives believe, straw men that bear little resemblance to reality.

Clyde Haberman manages to write an article about a matchmaker without talking to a single customer of the matchmaker, either satisfied or dissatisfied, and without reporting how much the matchmaker charges for her services. It would be a better article if it included that information.

The Times coverage this morning of the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI makes clear that the Times really, really doesn't like him. The second sentence of the article sums him up as "a profoundly conservative figure whose papacy was overshadowed by clerical abuse scandals."

The article goes on:

When he took office, Pope Benedict's well-known stands included the assertion that Catholicism is "true" and other religions are "deficient;" that the modern, secular world, especially in Europe, is spiritually weak; and that Catholicism is in competition with Islam. He had also strongly opposed homosexuality, the ordination of women priests and stem cell research.

… For the church's liberal elements, rather than being the answer to that crisis, Benedict's election represented the problem: an out-of-step conservative European academic.

… In 2006, less than two years into his papacy, Benedict stirred ire across the Muslim world, referring in a long, scholarly address to a conversation on the truths of Christianity and Islam that took place between a 14th-century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, and a Persian scholar.

"The emperor comes to speak about the issue of jihad, holy war," the pope said. "He said, I quote, 'Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'"

While making clear that he was quoting someone else, Benedict did not say whether he agreed or not. He also briefly discussed the Islamic concept of jihad, which he defined as "holy war," and said that violence in the name of religion is contrary to God's nature and to reason.

Catholics don't oppose all stem cell research, just embryonic stem cell research, so that part of the article is inaccurate. Moreover, I'd venture that most religious people believe their own religion is true and that others are deficient; the Times' tendency to marvel at this when it comes to Benedict says more about the Times' view of religion overall than it says about Benedict. Finally, does the Times have a competing definition of jihad? My authoritative Webster's Second unabridged defines jihad as "1. a Moslem holy war." This is another example that tells you more about the Times than about Benedict.

James B. Stewart has a Times column complaining about stock analysts who were too optimistic about the price of Apple stock. He quotes one source insisting that government regulators should measure the performance of the stock analysts and hold them "accountable." It goes on about the conflicts of interests that afflict analysts.

Entirely absent from the column is any degree of self-reflection by Mr. Stewart in regard to his own role forecasting the movements of Apple stock, or any analysis of the role of other financial journalists. In my view, they are just as bad as the stock analysts, maybe worse.

Mr. Stewart does not mention, for example, a January 16, 2011 column he wrote for the Wall Street Journal in a week when Apple shares hit $345. "I feel comfortable taking some profits," Mr. Stewart advised his readers at that time. The column was headlined "Are Apple's Best Years Over?" Readers who took that advice missed out on an Apple dividend payment and also missed out on a subsequent rise in the stock, which rose as high as $705 and closed Friday at $474, 37 percent higher than when Mr. Stewart told Wall Street Journal readers he felt comfortable selling it.

Other financial journalists and publications were off (at least so far) on the optimistic side of things. Forbes ran an article asserting that "it seems quite possible" that Apple stock would reach $1000 a share. CNBC and Bloomberg Businessweek and Dow Jones' Marketwatch also passed along $1000 estimates for Apple share prices more or less uncritically.

Where is Mr. Stewart's call to hold the financial press "accountable" for its calls, which don't seem much more accurate than those of the analysts he excoriates in his column?

Disclosure: I own some shares of Apple.