Here is an excerpt from a news article in today's New York Times about President Bush's tax cut plans: "Many economists doubt that the tax relief can be enacted quickly enough to make much difference to the economy this year. Republican leaders in Congress say they probably cannot send a tax bill to Mr. Bush before this summer, suggesting that any changes in withholdings would take effect in late summer or early fall. History suggests that the economy is likely to be recovering by then, especially since the Federal Reserve is already cutting interest rates and is considered likely to continue doing so in coming months."
If this New York Times news reporter really has a direct line to what "history suggests" will happen quarter-by-quarter in the U.S. economy, he ought to be off making a killing in the stock market. As it is, the Times just looks silly passing off economic guesswork as news reporting.
Day and Vanunu: The New York Times today runs an obituary of Samuel H. Day Jr. The obituary omits a significant fact about Day's later life: He was coordinator of the U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu. Vanunu is the Israeli imprisoned for publicly exposing Israel's nuclear secrets.
Anti-Macintosh Bias: Of all the insidious slants in the news coverage of the New York Times, perhaps the worst is the newspaper's slighting of those who use Apple Macintosh computers. The Times seems to think everyone is using an IBM-compatible machine running Windows software. An example of this comes in the lead article in the business section of today's New York Times, which says, "To figure out whether a message is HTML or text, a user can right-click on the message body." Mac users can't "right-click" anywhere; their mice have just one button. In any event, the verb "right-click" probably should be explained for those readers not steeped in computer jargon. Another example of anti-Mac slant came in a review in yesterday's Times of two books about the Microsoft trial. "Though Microsoft denied it, there can be little serious question that it possesses a monopoly in the market for personal computer operating systems," the reviewer wrote.
Late Again: The New York Times this morning discovers "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook." An article about the book runs on the front of the Times business section. The book and the story of its authors, David Borgenicht and Joshua Piven, however, are old news to readers of the Forward, which on May 26, 2000, published an article by Ellen Umansky on the topic that ran under the headline "Killer Bees and Other Catastrophes." It was the final issue of the Forward published before the newspaper's management (which at the time included the person who now edits Smartertimes.com) changed.