A dispatch from Oakland in the national section of today's New York Times refers to "the famously antimilitary Bay Area." While the University of California's Berkeley campus and some neighborhoods of San Francisco were centers of opposition to the Vietnam War, it's just an absurd overgeneralization to call the entire Bay Area "famously antimilitary." For one thing, the military has historically been a huge employer in the Bay Area. The Presidio Army Base, the Alameda Naval Air Station, the Navy's Oakland Fleet and Industrial Supply Center, the Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- many of these have since been converted to non-military uses, but they employed tens of thousands of people in their day. Many of those people remain in the Bay Area. The Times description of the Bay Area as "famously antimilitary" says more about the Times than it does about the Bay Area.
Wrong Number: When the New York Times claimed in a front-page article on July 20, 2001, that "Johns Hopkins receives more federal research money than any other university, $310 million last year," Smartertimes.com pegged the number and the claim as bogus. The New York Times never ran a correction of the July 20, 2001, article, but the newspaper is now modifying the claim in its new coverage. Today, a news article in the national section of the Times says Johns Hopkins "receives more federal money for medical research than any other university." Plainly, there's a distinction between "federal research money" in general, which includes things like contracts from the Pentagon and the Department of Energy, and "federal money for medical research." Today's New York Times article on the Johns Hopkins story waddles in a day after an article in the metro section of the Washington Post reported essentially the same facts.
'A Very Good Paper,' III: Smartertimes.com has received a report from inside Communist China that the government there has stopped blocking access to the Web site of the New York Times. Other major papers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post are still blocked. New York Times representatives had raised the blocking issue during their interview earlier this month with Jiang Zemin. A front-page article in today's New York Times on the AIDS epidemic in China, meanwhile, makes no mention of Mr. Jiang. The article particularly doesn't mention Mr. Jiang's claim that he had "no knowledge" of provincial authorities preventing Dr. Gao Yaojie from traveling to Washington to accept an international award in public health. Today's Times reports the denied travel, but not Mr. Jiang's response to a question about it. To find out about that you have to read Smartertimes.com or go visit an obscure page on the New York Times Web site.