A dispatch from Washington in the international section of today's New York Times begins, "A prototype antimissile weapon demolished a mock warhead tonight high above the Pacific Ocean in the second consecutive success for the Pentagon's costly missile defense program, military officials said."
The news article would be better if some editor had deleted the word "costly." The article eventually mentions that missile defense spending is now about $5.3 billion a year and that the Bush administration wants to increase that to $8.3 billion. Why not let the readers decide for themselves whether that is costly? It's a matter of opinion, after all. While $5.3 billion is costly by the standard of an individual American household budget, it isn't really all that much for a federal program. And some would argue that it is cheap compared to the price of having an American city struck by a missile armed with a nuclear or chemical warhead. The Times manages, elsewhere in today's newspaper, to write about "the Medicare program" and "Democrats demanding increased aid to the unemployed and low-income workers." The Times doesn't refer in those cases to "the costly Medicare program" or to Democrats demanding "costly increased aid to the unemployed and low-income workers." Only the missile defense spending is tagged with the label "costly." That's a signal from the New York Times news department that missile defense is a bad idea and that spending on it should be opposed. There are plenty of readers who, no matter what their views on the merits of antimissile spending, would prefer that the Times news columns retained at least a pretense of neutrality on the issue.
Ignore: A front-page article in today's New York Times reports that Mayor-elect Michael Bloomberg "spent his own money on the campaign, choosing to ignore the city's campaign finance law, which seeks to restrict the influence of money on politics by requiring candidates to limit the amount of money they raise and spend in order to qualify for public matching funds." This makes Mr. Bloomberg sound like a scofflaw. In fact Mr. Bloomberg did not "ignore" the law; he acted in compliance with its provisions, which allow candidates to opt out of the spending limits and, in doing so, to turn down the chance to receive public matching funds.