The Times misstep that's causing all the buzz this week is the newspaper's publication, and then unexplained partial unpublication, of a chart highlighting the Jewish religion of members of Congress opposed to the Iran deal. That graphic, which used the color yellow to mark the Jewish members and high-Jewish-population districts, is reproduced before and after the changes in Yair Rosenberg's Twitter feed, which also carries a series of illuminating comments about the matter. (A Times spokeswoman explained to the Washington Post's Erik Wemple that "After a number of readers raised questions, editors took another look and decided that that element of the graphic put too much emphasis on the question of which Democrats opposing the deal were Jewish...singling those lawmakers out in a separate column of the graphic seemed unnecessary, and struck some readers as insensitive.")
Just as egregious, and possibly even more so, is a Gail Collins column on the Times op-ed page. In urging readers to be informed about the presidential race, the column comments glancingly, "your friends are going to expect you to update them regularly. If you can't, be prepared to take an active part in discussions about the Tom Brady divorce rumors."
If the Times thinks that "divorce rumors" involving the New England Patriots quarterback qualify as news that is "fit to print," it can write an article about them that includes actual reporting. But in the absence of such reporting, and in the absence of any divorce filing, slipping the "rumors" into print using the vehicle of a political column on the op-ed page seems like an example of the sort of irresponsible salacious celebrity gossip-mongering you'd expect from a tabloid, not from the Times.
Elsewhere, in the newspaper, the technology columnist Farhad Manjoo makes a similar digression that some editor should have excised. Amid a column about the new iPhone, Mr. Manjoo writes:
Across large swaths of the globe, in other words, the iPhone is a status symbol, which is not to say that it's frivolous — unlike a Prada suit, the iPhone is one status symbol that you'll still find extremely useful.
I'd like to be a fly on the wall of the advertising executive responsible for Prada's New York Times advertising budget when he read that sentence. Who is to say that a Prada suit isn't useful, anyway? It keeps the wearer warm (or cool) and comfortable, providing an elegant appearance that just might help its wearer impress someone that needs to be impressed (a client, a job-interviewer, the person who assigns the restaurant tables...). Fashion criticism from Farhad Manjoo is like sports celebrity gossip from Gail Collins. They should leave it to the pros and instead stick to their own specialty. Even star columnists sometimes need editors.