"Personal Health" columnist Jane Brody uses her Times platform to complain about her grandchildren (and, implicitly, their parents). In the middle of an otherwise traditionally neutral and detached account of the effects of too much "screen time" on children, she writes:
Two of my grandsons, ages 10 and 13, seem destined to suffer some of the negative effects of video-game overuse. The 10-year-old gets up half an hour earlier on school days to play computer games, and he and his brother stay plugged into their hand-held devices on the ride to and from school. "There's no conversation anymore," said their grandfather, who often picks them up. When the family dines out, the boys use their devices before the meal arrives and as soon as they finish eating.
The paragraph struck this reader as strange. What do the grandsons have to say for themselves? What do their parents have to say for themselves? Does the tradition of journalistic fair play that allows a subject or target to defend himself or at least give his side of the story fall entirely by the wayside when the person being written about is the family member of a Times journalist? If it's too awkward to be fair, maybe the Times columnist should find families to write about in the Times other than her own. If the grandfather has a complaint about his grandchildren, wouldn't the thing to do be to take the matter up directly with them, or with their parents, rather than running to his wife the Times columnist for airing the matter in the newspaper?