An article in the city section of today's New York Times reports on an effort to prevent a two-acre family farm in Queens from being sold to a developer who wants to build 22 two-family houses on the property. The Times is constantly whining about the housing "crisis" and the housing "emergency" in New York City. But today's article contains not a single comment from an affordable-housing advocate. The developer who wants to build on the land is not identified or quoted. There are three persons quoted in the article, and they all oppose the house-building. It's an incredibly one-sided dispatch.
Patronizing: The lead article in the Week in Review section of today's New York Times says of Al Qaeda that "Unlike guerilla groups from Colombia to Chechnya, it holds no territory -- especially now that its patrons in the Taliban movement have been routed in most of Afghanistan." In fact, reports in the Washington Post and even some in the New York Times suggest that it was Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden that were the patrons of the Taliban, not the reverse.
Unofficial: An article in today's New York Times refers to Richard Perle as "chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an unofficial Pentagon policy review panel." It's not "unofficial." In fact, the board is funded by the government, appointed by the government, and created by the government. Its charter begins with the words: "Official Designation: This committee will be officially designated the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee (referred to as the Defense Policy Board, abbreviated DPBAC)."
Stuck in Cement: Today's New York Times magazine carries an article about the island of Babuyan Claro. The article makes several references to "cement," as in a "cement house" "a cement church" and "a cement bridge," with what an island resident describes as "long metal rods inside the cement." The Times magazine editors would have done well to consult the newspaper's own stylebook. The Times stylebook entry on "cement" says, "Use 'concrete' instead to mean the material that forms blocks, walls and roads. One ingredient is 'cement,' the binding agent that is mixed with water, sand and gravel."
In- 'L'-egant: An article in the Arts & Leisure section of today's New York Times reports on synagogue architecture. It says one plan "was based, for unknown reasons, on arcane formal manipulations of the Hebrew letter L." There is no letter "L" in Hebrew, which has a different alphabet from English. There is a rough Hebrew equivalent to the letter "L," the letter "lamed."
Loss of Liberties: The op-ed page of today's New York Times strips the newspaper's regular columnists of their column labels. The "Liberties" and "Foreign Affairs" columns used to run with those labels. Now the columns are identified only by the names of the columnists. The Times gives no explanation for the change.