Those pesky campaign aides to Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader sure are giving the bigfoot political reporter of the New York Times a tough time. They won't tell him where Mr. Nader's television commercials are running. So, in a "political memo" that begins on the front page of this morning's New York Times, the reporter writes: "This week, Mr. Nader started showing a television commercial (with an authentic old politics touch, his staff refused to say where the modest buy was taking place or how much was spent)."
Yet, in the same newspaper, on the same day, on page A10 of New York editions, a box about "The Ad Campaign" reports that Mr. Nader's commercial "is running on cable and on local broadcast stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and Santa Barbara, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Seattle; New York; and Washington."
If the writer of the "political memo" couldn't manage to figure out where Mr. Nader's ads were running, how did the writer of the "Ad Campaign" box manage to find out? And isn't there any editor reading all these stories before they go in the paper, in an effort to smooth over the obvious contradictions?
Late Again: The lead story in this morning's New York Times, in the top righthand corner of the front page, reports on new developments in the investigation of EgyptAir Flight 990. In the second paragraph, the story refers to FBI reports "that the co-pilot had been accused of a variety of sexual improprieties at a Manhattan hotel during visits there in the year before the crash." This is a major development, and the Times gets into more detail about the co-pilot's behavior in the rest of the story. But to readers of USA Today, this is old news. It was on the front page of yesterday's USA Today, under the headline "EgyptAir co-pilot linked to lewd acts; Suggestive behavior led up to crash that killed 217, FBI reports say." The Times story doesn't mention or credit the USA Today scoop.
Late Again: A story in the national section of this morning's Times runs under the headline "As Fires Rage in West, Administration Is Given Blame for Not Acting to Prevent Them." This is old news to readers of the Washington Post, which on Wednesday, August 9 ran an opinion piece by Robert H. Nelson under the headline "Fires by Design," making the case that the fires are the result of Washington policy decisions that backfired, including the Clinton administration's aversion to logging on public lands. The Times story doesn't mention or credit the Washington Post article.
Welfare Cadillac: More evidence of the Times's unreformed view of welfare comes in a front-page dispatch this morning on state efforts to reduce fraud in the food stamp program. The article reports on the use of "parking-lot espionage" in which Tennessee investigators check parking lots for the cars of food stamp applicants. "That's crazy," the article quotes the head of a Nashville food pantry as saying. "It's like, come on, people!" another welfare administrator is quoted as saying, ridiculing the parking lot program. Of course, there isn't a single quote in the story from a single center-right welfare-reform expert, such as Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles.com or Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation or even Jason Turner of New York City. Just quotes from human services bureaucrats and the hunger industry and some poor people, one of whom is anonymous. The truth is, the "welfare Cadillac" (or BMW or Mercedes) image is so well-entrenched in American lore and policy debate that by now it is almost a cliche. As kausfiles.com pointed out in a December 18, 1999 dispatch, "food stamps are welfare." So there's no reason the same approach that has been successful in implementing welfare reform should not be applied to food stamps.
A Catch on Online Car Sales: A story on the front of the business section of this morning's New York Times reports on plans by General Motors to start selling its cars on the Internet. The story ignores a key regulatory obstacle that complicates the plan: laws in 40 states preventing car manufacturers from selling cars directly to the public. In Texas, state regulators threatened to shut down a Ford web site that included used-car prices. The obstacles were detailed in a Cato Institute study by Solveig Singleton. The Times story seems oblivious to the legal issue.