A news article in the business section of today's New York Times discusses a Vermont newspaper called the Rutland Herald. The Times writes, in an article without a dateline, that the Herald "remains anchored in this squat, unlovely city in otherwise lovely central Vermont." Does the Times really need to stick in that swipe at Rutland as "unlovely"? Smartertimes.com would bet that at least some of the people living there find it lovely. Whether you would find it lovely or not is an opinion that would probably track with how you feel about small New England cities. Actually describing the city's neighborhoods, its downtown, its businesses and its people would be more useful to Times readers than is passing along the newspaper's subjective judgment of whether the city is lovely or "unlovely."
Sins of Omission: The lead, front-page article in this morning's New York Times, about the Federal Communications Commission's plans to relax the regulations on cross-ownership of newspapers and television stations, mentions that the move would benefit "the companies controlled by Rupert Murdoch." But it's strange that the Times, a newspaper based in New York, doesn't spell out more clearly for its hometown readers what the changes would mean for the New York newspaper and television stations controlled by Mr. Murdoch. It would have made the article more relevant and interesting to New York readers if the Times had mentioned the call letters and channel numbers of the New York television stations affected by the regulations.
Unusual: A dispatch from Tokyo in the international section of today's New York Times has a sentence that says, "The news, which came in an unusual late morning statement from the Imperial Household Agency, seemed deliberately couched in ambiguity, perhaps out of caution after the recent loss of a child." What's unusual? Is it unusual for the Imperial Household Agency to release any statements at all? Or are they just usually released in the early mornings or the afternoons rather than the late morning? The Times article is in this regard no help at all to readers. It asserts that the statement is "unusual" and then leaves readers wondering what is unusual about it.
Marshall Plan: The "Essay" column on the Op-Ed page of today's New York Times reports on Andrew Marshall. "Pentagon brass shuddered when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld named this legendary shatterer of shibboleths to be his adviser on 'net assessment' and made him a key player in the review that will reshape our armed services," the Times column says. The implication is that Mr. Rumsfeld naming Mr. Marshall as adviser on "net assessment" is a new development that has Pentagon brass shuddering. In fact, as Paul Gigot noted in a 1997 column, Mr. Marshall has run the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment "for six presidencies." George W. Bush's administration makes it seven. Mr. Marshall's involvement in the defense review is surely newsworthy, but the sentence in the Times column oversells the fresh shudder-inducing aspect of the net assessment job, in which Mr. Marshall is an institution.