Two exhibits in today's installment of "I don't know who these guys think their intended audience is, but I don't think this was written for me":

Exhibit no. 1: The front page of the New York Times food section carries an article headlined "Income Inequality And Great Wines." It complains that "Income Inequality Has Erased Your Chance to Drink the Great Wines." The lead example involves how "back in 1994, a bottle of Comte Georges de Vogüé Musigny 1991, a grand cru, retailed for $80 (the equivalent of $141 in 2020, accounting for inflation). Today, that bottle costs about $800."

"It is impossible for most people to pay for these wines," the Times article complains.

The article does not mention that $800 is less than the price of a seven-day home delivery subscription to the Times, which is now $20 a week, or $1,050 a year. Nor does it consider the possibility that a group of people might chip in and share an expensive bottle.

More and more, the Times is so "woke" as to be almost unreadable.

The Sunday "T" magazine carries an adoring profile of Angela Davis, labeled under the category "The Greats."

Among the highlights, or lowlights, depending on how you see it:

In 2018, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama invited her to receive an award, which was rescinded three months later after unnamed members of the community complained to the board about her support for Palestinian rights and a boycott of Israel. (The institute eventually reversed its decision and issued Davis a public apology.)

Then:

Throughout the '70s and '80s, as the Communist Party U.S.A.'s presence dwindled, and Communist regimes worldwide became increasingly totalitarian, Davis remained a staunch supporter of the party's ideas, twice running as its candidate for vice president in the '80s. In 1991, she stepped away, along with a number of other members, because the party refused to engage in processes of democratization...

A New York Times op-ed by Stephen Wertheim, "deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University," includes this passage:

Citing China's "bankrupt totalitarian ideology," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo heralds a new dawn for U.S. leadership. "Securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party," he said in July, "is the mission of our time."

Is it? China is authoritarian and on the rise. But it is hardly Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. China is open for business, whether on fair terms or not; the world's largest trading nation makes a strange candidate for a totalitarian menace whose every activity closes off the earth. And unlike 20th-century rivals, China has long abstained from armed conquest. Though it threatens Taiwan, no one thinks it is about to invade U.S. allies like South Korea or Japan.

A New York Times "fact check" of a Trump campaign commercial faults the ad: "Later, the ad says Mr. Trump is 'developing a vaccine in record time.' While potential vaccines may arrive in record time, they are being developed by private companies, not by Mr. Trump or his administration."

Who will fact check the fact-checkers?

Here is the New York Times's Science section's own "vaccine tracker."

Pfizer: "The Trump administration awarded a $1.9 billion contract in July for 100 million doses to be delivered by December and the option to acquire 500 million more doses."

The double standards of the New York Times are on clear display in the newspaper's coverage of illegal drugs.

Sunday's New York Times style section carries a mostly laudatory feature about parents turning to drugs during the pandemic: "Though there aren't reliable statistics that break down parents' use of alcohol, marijuana and anti-anxiety medications specifically, overall adult use of these substances has gone up since the pandemic began, said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse."

The Sunday Times Real Estate section, under the headline "Love and the Lockdown," devotes a page to stories of couples deciding to move in together during the pandemic. The article mentions, and includes photographs of, six different couples, all six of whom appear to be white and heterosexual. If a Republican campaign rally or political convention or corporate board looked like this, the Times would be all over it for the lack of diversity.

The latest example of how the New York Times is throwing traditional journalistic objectivity overboard in its effort to defeat President Trump comes toward the end of a long investigative article (the second in a series) about the president's tax returns. The Times writes, "After he announced his candidacy in 2015 with racist comments about Mexicans, NBC, which carried 'The Apprentice,' cut ties with him and he sold his interest in the Miss Universe pageant, another reliable moneymaker."

The approaching election seems to be tempting the New York Times into partisanship.

Here are three recent examples where the Times seems to have stopped even attempting to appear neutral.

Example No. 1. A Times news article headlined "Justice Dept. Aids Trump's False Narrative on Voting." This almost comically tilted article begins:

In the effort led by President Trump to create a misleading impression of widespread voter fraud, administration and campaign officials have seized on nine mail-in military ballots in a Pennsylvania county that Mr. Trump won by 20 points in 2016.

Federal officials have disclosed that they are investigating whether local elections officials improperly discarded the ballots, at least seven of which were cast for Mr. Trump, they said.

Today's New York Times offers a rare opportunity for a side-by-side comparison of how the newspaper covers Democrats and Republicans with similar policies.

Here is a passage from a Times news article about President Trump proposing an arms sale to Taiwan: "The proposed sales come as President Trump and his campaign strategists try to paint him as tough on China in the run-up to the election in November. They are eager to divert the conversation among American voters away from Mr. Trump's vast failures on the coronavirus pandemic and the economy, and to paper over his constant praise for Xi Jinping, China's authoritarian leader, and his earlier encouragement or tolerance of some of Mr. Xi's most repressive policies, including in the regions of Xinjiang and Hong Kong."

Over at the Algemeiner, I have a piece headlined "New York Times Marks World War II Anniversary With Harsh Criticism of U.S."

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A subheadline in the New York Times magazine, over an article about Donald Trump, Jr., reports, "Of all the president's children, he has the strongest connection to the politics, voters and online disinformation ecosystem that put his father in the White House."

In this Sunday's New York Times Book Review, reviewing Lesley M.M. Blume's Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, William Langewiesche writes: "The subject of nuclear war is too important not to fascinate, and though we have avoided it for 75 years, the possibility now looms closer than before."

A New York Times editorial, "Steve Bannon's Art of the Grift," says in part:

The looming question, however, is whether President Trump will keep Mr. Bannon at arm's length. Americans can feel little confidence that Mr. Bannon will receive a fair trial and, if convicted, a fair punishment. By commuting Roger Stone's sentence in July, Mr. Trump demonstrated a willingness to shelter his current and former associates from the legal consequences of their actions.

The Times' signal of concern that Bannon "receive a fair trial," is touching, but the newspaper sure isn't helping matters by running an editorial denouncing him as a grifter before he's even had the chance to mount a defense.

Do the Times editorialists really lack confidence that the federal judge to whom the case is assigned, U.S. District Court Judge Analisa Torres, an Obama appointee, will give Bannon a fair trial? Or is the issue that a Manhattan trial jury won't be fair to Bannon?

A Times news article reports on the City of New York moving homeless people, some of them mentally ill, substance-abusing, or sex offenders, at government expense into hotels on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It includes this sentence: "The owner of a well-known French bistro, Nice Matin, which adjoins the Lucerne, said he believed the harsh rhetoric among some in the neighborhood had hurt business."

If the bistro is indeed "well-known," it's unnecessary to inform Times readers of that—they already know, so it is redundant. "Well-known" is like the word "famous"—in cases where it's accurate, it's almost always unnecessary.

The same redundancy objection applies, by the way, to the term "French bistro." Are there non-French bistros? It is late August so maybe all the editors who would ordinarily catch this sort of thing are on vacation, but maybe even at peak levels this is just about what you can expect of Times editing care these days. Would this sort of thing ever have gotten through back in the days when Allan M. Siegal was running the copy desk?