The New York Times today manages to misspell the names of two well-known political figures. The first is the press secretary to the Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott. The spokesman's name is John Czwartacki; a story in the national section of today's Times renders it as "Czartacki." The second is a secretary of the interior during the Reagan administration, James Watt; a column on the op-ed page today refers to him as "Watts." Each is off by merely a letter, and readers get the general idea of whom the Times is writing about. But basic journalistic craft dictates that a newspaper is supposed to spell names correctly. If a newspaper can't manage to spell names correctly, readers might get the idea that the newspaper is careless about facts. Those careless habits may also carry over into more substantive matters, as they often do at the Times.
Stock Market "Loner": A story in yesterday's Times about a 15-year-old stock market manipulator in New Jersey reported that the young man "was described as a loner." Smartertimes.com nearly mocked the phrase at the time, because it is such a time-worn term in crime stories. You can almost picture the reporter leading the boy's classmates to the conclusion by asking the question directly: "So, was he a loner?" The reporter, of course, was merely following the instructions of some editor, who at some point probably taught the reporter, "Make sure you find out if the kid was either an honor student or a loner." Virtually all young criminals fall into the loner mold, just as all crime and accident victims fall into the honor student mold, to judge by the newspaper accounts. The trouble is, as today's follow-up story in the Times metro section shows, the facts don't always fit with the story dictated by the hoary journalistic conventions. The youth who was described in yesterday's paper as a "loner" is described in today's paper as having been a member of a three-person stock tournament team named Triple Threat and as a partner with another classmate in two Internet companies. There's no reference in today's story to him being a "loner," and no explanation of why yesterday's story suggested, apparently incorrectly, that he was one.
Berenson and the 10 Jews: To get a good idea of where the Times stands politically, compare its coverage of the Lori Berenson case and that of the 10 Jews imprisoned in Iran. Ms. Berenson is one Jewish woman that the Times itself acknowledged in an editorial today "may well have had some involvement with the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, which sought to overthrow the government" in Peru. The Tupac Amaru are a Communist terrorist group. The 10 Iranian Jews are accused of spying for Israel and America, and there is absolutely no evidence that they did so other than their own coerced confessions. Neither the Iranian Jews nor Ms. Berenson has had the benefit of what Americans would consider due process. Yet the Times has been crusading on behalf of Ms. Berenson with a series of prominently placed news stories capped by today's editorial. The Iranians -- remember there are ten of them, and, unlike Ms. Berenson, they apparently did absolutely nothing wrong -- have gotten some coverage, but it has been less prominent than the coverage of Ms. Berenson. Today, for example, the Times places on its front page a story about Iranian women getting nose jobs, relegating to an inside page the news that an Iranian appeals court had substantively refused to overturn the verdicts against the ten Jews. One could argue that the Times is paying more attention to Ms. Berenson because her parents are from the Upper West Side, but the Iranian Jews also have relatives in Great Neck, N.Y., in Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the Times' readership areas.