A front-page article in today's New York Times about President Bush's treatment of California passes along unchallenged the following quote from "an outside adviser who knows Bush well": "They're scared of the place. They're snake bitten. They put $22 million into the state and Gore spent zero. And they lost by 13 points." In fact, according to the California Secretary of State's office, Mr. Bush lost California by 11.8 percentage points, not "13."
"Inadequately Regulated": A generally nuanced and interesting dispatch from Bangladesh on the front page of today's New York Times reports: "What Bangladesh has to offer the global economy is some of the world's cheapest labor -- and what this impoverished nation has received in return is the economic boost of a $4.3 billion apparel industry, the fuller pockets that come with 1.5 million jobs and the horrors that arise from 3,300 inadequately regulated garment factories, some of which are among the worst sweatshops ever to taunt the human conscience." The Times doesn't really support its opinion that these factories are "inadequately regulated." In fact, a few paragraphs later the article notes that the country's laws require overtime pay and holidays. The problem, it seems from the article, may be not inadequate regulation but inadequate enforcement of the existing regulations. Or evil owners who are refusing to comply with the existing regulations. And it seems like most of the workers and factory owners quoted in the article don't say the regulation is inadequate, either -- the Times reports that after a fire at one garment factory that killed 52 people, among the demands of the surviving workers was "a swift reopening of the factory."
Default: This morning's New York Times Book Review contains a review of a book about Las Vegas. The book asserts that the Cuban missile crisis was caused by a "tantrum" in which President Kennedy ended up, in the reviewer's paraphrase, "forcing Nikita Krushchev to protect his client by placing missiles in Cuba." The book further asserts, according to the review, that President Reagan was the "emcee" of a "slow-motion coup d'etat" largely underwritten by the mob. The Times reviewer opines that "most of the book's soundings seem true." If they are true, it sounds like a matter for the Times front page. And isn't the task of the reviewer, in part, to distinguish what is true, not merely to pronounce that findings "seem true"?
No One: Here's a sentence from the Week in Review section of this morning's New York Times: "The way Mr. Bush has defined himself in this budget, to no one's real surprise, is as an ideological conservative." Well, that would be to the surprise of "no one" except maybe the Times editorial writers and the columnists on its op-ed page. One of those columnists wrote in his "Abroad at Home" column on March 31, under the headline, "The Feeling of a Coup," "All this from a man who ran as a 'compassionate conservative,' concealing his hard-edged ideology, and who could not get half the voters to vote for him even in that guise." If Mr. Bush really ran "concealing his hard-edged ideology," as the columnist claims, how come it is to "no one's real surprise" that he has come out with a budget defining himself "as an ideological conservative"?