An article in the business section of today's New York Times reports on a lawsuit accusing Nuance Communications and five of its top executives of securities fraud. The article never names the law firm that filed the suit and it never names a single one of the "shareholders" making the accusation. The one person identified as a critic of the company is identified only by an Internet screen name, "lostnuance." If the Times is going to pass along to its readers an allegation of securities fraud that at this point is merely an unproven claim made in civil court, it would make sense to name the persons making the allegation. The Times article reports how much stock the Nuance executives sold before the price of the stock went down, but it makes no mention of how much Nuance stock, if any, the executives still own. If they really were engaged in "securities fraud," how come federal regulators haven't intervened? It sure looks like the Times is carrying water for the contingency-fee class-action lawyers at the Little Rock law firm of Cauley, Geller, Bowman & Coates (http://www.classlawyer.com) on this one.
Welfare and Poverty: A brief item in the national section of today's New York Times claims, "Most of the participants in Wisconsin's pioneering program to get welfare recipients into the workplace are still living in poverty, a study by the state's Legislative Audit Bureau has found." The study found nothing of the sort. If you don't believe Smartertimes.com, go read the study here: http://www.legis.state.wi.us/lab/Reports/01-7tear.htm. While the press release summary of the study trumpets "The 1999 Incomes of Most Former Participants Were Below the Poverty Level," in fact, the study only looked at the about two-thirds of former welfare recipients who filed Wisconsin tax returns. Of those two-thirds, if you count the earned-income tax credit, 46.7 percent of the former welfare recipients were above the federal poverty level in 1999, the study says. Another study of the Wisconsin system that counted other, non-cash benefits such as food stamps, child care subsidies and medical assistance benefits found that 92 percent of former welfare recipients were above the poverty level. The Legislative Audit Bureau's study also acknowledges that it didn't count child support as income. Given all these details -- the fact that the incomes of a third of the former welfare recipients are entirely unknown, the fact that non-cash benefits and child support weren't included -- it's a poor show for the Times to pass along unchallenged this supposed finding that "Most of the participants in Wisconsin's pioneering program to get welfare recipients into the workplace are still living in poverty." The effect is to reinforce the notion, already prevalent among many Times readers, that the newspaper has something against welfare reform.
'Alarmed Whites': The front-page New York Times coverage today of the Cincinnati riot dwells on the fact that police there have shot dead 15 black men in the past six years. It makes no mention, however, of whether the number of police shootings is high or low for a city of Cincinnati's size, which would be a useful fact for readers seeking to evaluate the situation. The Times soft-pedals the actual rioting going on in Cincinnati, referring to it as "protest and vandalism," and reporting that "groups of young blacks had raided stores, set fires and alarmed whites."
"Alarmed" is a curious euphemism for what these gangs of rioters were doing to whites. Here's a more direct account from Thursday's Cincinnati Enquirer: "In Avondale, a mob of black youths that had been pelting passing cars with bricks stopped a car on Reading Road and dragged a white woman into the street, beating her until other neighborhood residents rescued her. Kim Brown, an Avondale resident who was a witness to the attack, said members of the mob pulled the woman out of the car and 'started busting her up.' Then, Ms. Brown said, other neighborhood residents stepped in to pull the woman to safety."
Today's Times dispatch, like yesterday's, manages to avoid the term "riot," which is the term that the Enquirer is using to describe the situation. While blacks in Cincinnati are not rioting, according to the Times, Christians in Sudan are. The Times international section reports in a brief item that "Fifty-three Christians convicted of rioting over government efforts to move their Easter ceremony out of a public square have been flogged, the Sudanese Council of Churches said." There's no explanation by the Times of exactly how the behavior by the Sudanese Christians rose to the level of "rioting," while the behavior of some black youths in Cincinnati apparently did not.
Calm in the Mideast: The New York Times comes through this morning with one of its typically vile editorials on "The Need for Calm in the Mideast." The spectacle of the Times editorial page lecturing Ariel Sharon and the democratically elected government of Israel from the left on the likelihood that Mr. Sharon's actions risk "worsening Israel's security problems" is just breathtaking. The editorialists might consult a front-page dispatch from Jerusalem in today's New York Times, which reports, "many Israelis, despite the bloody present and the uncertain future, like what they are hearing." The notion that the Times editorialists are better equipped that Mr. Sharon and the Israelis themselves to determine what effect Israel's actions will have on the Israeli security situation is probably enough to make many readers with an appreciation for Israel and its democracy lose their "calm."