The "today's paper" page of the Times Web site and the "today's headlines" email from the New York Times both summarize the paper's lead news article of the day as follows: "There are concerns about whether the forces that have driven the market rally — government spending and banner corporate profits — will be sufficient to push it higher."
Got that? "Government spending" is what drove the stock market higher. The Times news article, however, reports nothing of the sort, attributing the rally in part to actions by the Federal Reserve. The words "government spending" do not appear in the news article. There are some problems, of course, with "government spending" as an explanation for the increase in the stock market. For one, the rally has continued notwithstanding the election of a Republican House of Representatives that professes a commitment to spending restraint and the implementation of the "sequester" restraints in the growth of government spending.
And of course the Times's Nobel laureate columnist, Princeton University economist Paul Krugman, wrote just the other day about what he called "an unprecedented run of declines in public employment and government purchases that have crippled our economy's recovery." Got that? The Times wants readers to believe that rising government spending is feeding a stock market rally at the same time that declining government spending is crippling the economy's recovery.
The error is illuminating about the ideology of the editor who writes these summaries. A conservative wouldn't necessarily agree that government spending is good for the stock market, reasoning that the money the government spends has to come from somewhere eventually, and that somewhere is likely to be the private sector, which can probably spend the money or invest it more efficiently than the government can.