A front-page news article in today's New York Times reports that "officials are alarmed" by a police "exodus." The Times reports: "Twice as many police officers retired in 2001 as in 2000, police officials said. Their reasons varied, but the most significant seem to be a growing dissatisfaction with salary levels. The annual base salary for a beginning officer in the city is $31,305, which lags behind such places as Suffolk County and Los Angeles by roughly $10,000."
One remarkable aspect here is the ability of officials to be "alarmed" on the demand of the New York Times, no matter what the underlying trend. If half as many police officers retired in 2001 as in 2000, officials would surely be "alarmed" at the aging police force that is costing the city more in salary for the same number of officers, and that is preventing the replacement of a mostly white, male force hired decades ago with a younger and more diverse group.
Another remarkable aspect is the use of the irrelevant statistic. The officers that are "retiring" aren't beginning officers, so presumably the salary gap between what beginning officers are paid in New York City and what beginning officers are paid in Suffolk County or Los Angeles is irrelevant. The salary gap might be relevant if experienced New York officers were quitting to go work for more money in Suffolk County or in Los Angeles, but the Times article does not say that this is happening. Readers aren't told anything about what the salary gap is, if there is one, for experienced officers. In fact, the article says that rather than going to work for other police departments, some officers who have been leaving are going to work in the private sector, where "For the last few years, a booming economy has drawn officers in droves into higher-paying private-sector jobs." You'd think that now that the booming private-sector economy is a thing of the past, the officials would cease being "alarmed," but it looks like the "alarm" is going to continue until the police get a raise.
The police and the Times seem to be copying the stunt pulled by the New York public school teachers, who often compare New York City salaries with those in the suburbs and warn of an exodus. But as Sol Stern has reported, Professor Michael Podgursky of the University of Missouri Economics Department actually studied the issue and found that, as Mr. Stern summarized the finding, "For the two school years 1996-97 and 1997-98, there was an average net outflow of 293 New York City teachers to the suburbs. That's less than one half of 1 percent of all city teachers." The Times article gives no estimate of how many police officers New York City has lost to Suffolk County or Los Angeles.
Good News, Bad News: A graphic on the front of the business section of today's Times has two columns, one labeled "good news" and another labeled "bad news." Under good news is an increase in "government approvals for construction of moderately priced housing units." Under "bad news" is a decline in the amount of venture capital invested in Silicon Valley companies. There are plenty of people out there who would prefer less destruction of California hillsides for new housing construction, "moderately priced" or otherwise. And there are plenty of people who think that any such new construction should be dictated by the workings of the free market, not by a system of government approvals and price controls that tend to breed both corruption and perverse incentives. There are also plenty of people who think a decline in venture capital investment from the overheated environment of 2000 is a welcome return to sanity. Given all that, why doesn't the Times just report the news, skip the heavy-handed labels, and let the newspaper readers decide for themselves whether the news is "good" or "bad"?
Nonnews: An article in the business section of today's New York Times reports on a cover story in Time magazine devoted to a new Apple computer. "It is hard to argue that the piece -- one of the first nonnews cover articles delivered to Time's 4 million plus subscribers since Sept. 11 -- was a model of objectivity," the Times reports. Well, the Apple product announcement sure struck Smartertimes.com as news. It was a new product. It was interesting. It was important. Lots of other news organizations wrote about it as news. Where does the Times get off describing it as "nonnews"? Never mind the richness of the Times business section -- "good news," "bad news" -- lecturing Time magazine on the topic of objectivity.
Sloppy on Syria: Today's New York Times carries an entire dispatch from Damascus that dwells on Syria's relationship with Washington. The article somehow omits the news that a meeting between the Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad, and the American president, George W. Bush, is planned within the next 30 days. The president of the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon, Ziad Abdelnour, told Smartertimes.com that he hopes Mr. Bush exercises caution in any such meeting. "The Syrians -- they can't be trusted. They have their own agenda," he said. "We don't want Bush to be swayed into the appeasement of Syria." Today's Times article refers to Syria's efforts to "focus attention on ending Israel's occupation of Arab lands," but the Times somehow avoids making any mention of Syria's own occupation of the entire country of Lebanon.