An article on the front of the Times business section reports on companies that are offering online banking services:

Several other established companies are also moving in. Acorn, which attracted four million customers to its investing app, is about to start offering its customers a debit card to spend their money. And SoFi, originally an online lender, has added a bank account offering this year. Even Amazon is rumored to be working on a checking account for younger customers.

"Is rumored" (with an online-only hyperlink to a Wall Street Journal article) just strikes me as a lame formulation for Times business coverage. The reason readers like me fork over hundreds of dollars a year to the Times is that it employs about 1,300 newsroom employees whose job is precisely to check out these "rumors" by doing actual reporting to ascertain whether the "rumors" are true or false, rather than just shoveling them along. If the Times doesn't have the reporting capability or resources to find this particular thing out, a way to handle that transparently would be with a sentence that said something like, "Even Amazon is exploring offering something like a checking account, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal that the Times could not independently confirm" or "according to an anonymously sourced report in the Wall Street Journal that Amazon declined to comment on to the Times."

As a reader, what I want from the Times is news, not rumors. Rumors, I can get plenty of for free on the Internet.

The New York Times has a highly favorable architecture review of the two-year, $205 million renovation of the Ford Foundation's Manhattan headquarters, an update that apparently includes the conversion of the former president's suite into new conference rooms named after Wilma Mankiller and Fannie Lou Hamer.

It's a lengthy review that manages nonetheless to avoid entirely any discussion of either how the foundation escaped the control of the Ford family whose fortune funded it or of whether, fancy offices aside, the foundation has much to show for itself in terms of progress for the disadvantaged groups it's trying to help. Maybe instead of fancy conference rooms in Manhattan the Ford Foundation should be based in Mississippi, or on an Indian reservation. Maybe they should have assigned the architecture review to William Easterly. I'm kidding about Easterly, but I'm serious about the idea of the architecture review doing a better job of considering not only the building the foundation is in, but the way it matches or fails to match the mission at hand. What if the Foundation, instead of renovating the building, sold it and gave the the proceeds and the money it would have spent on the renovation to actual poor people in Mississippi and on Indian reservations? Maybe that wouldn't work, but it's not a crazy question to at least raise in the review of a fancy headquarters of a charity.

The New York Times has now issued a formal correction of the error in the North Korea editorial it published last week. The error was the subject of a Smartertimes item.

The Times correction reads: "An earlier version of this editorial incorrectly said that President Trump's special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, has yet to meet a North Korean official since his appointment. Mr. Biegun has met several senior North Korean officials, but he has not held working-level talks with his designated North Korean counterpart, the vice foreign minister Choe Son-hui."

A New York Times article about the Presidential Medal of Freedom reports: "Mr. Obama honored President George Bush."

Because there have been two presidents named George Bush, that sentence in the New York Times isn't particularly helpful. In cases, such as this one, where it's not easily or immediately apparent from the context which president is meant, the Times would do its readers a favor by using middle initials — George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush — to distinguish.

In case you were wondering, it was George H.W. Bush who received the medal from Obama.

In a front-page New York Times news article about the presidential prospects of Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, comes this passage: "Throughout his political career, he has championed populist platitudes like the 'dignity of work' that have resonated with working-class voters in all corners of Ohio while also supporting liberal social causes like women's reproductive rights and L.G.B.T.Q. rights."

The Times repeats the language in a photo cutline: "Mr. Brown has championed platitudes like the 'dignity of work' that have long resonated with working-class voters in all corners of Ohio."

A "platitude," according to my authoritative Webster's Second Unabridged dictionary, is "commonplaceness, dullness, insipidity; as there was much platitude in his remarks" or "a trite, dull, or commonplace remark, especially one uttered as if it were a novelty or matter of importance."

In other words, when the Times, in what is supposed to be a news article, calls the phrase the "dignity of work" a platitude, it's a kind of sneer, an insult. It's the language of snark, of contempt, rather than of respect. It is not a compliment.

It just so happens that Oren Cass's book The Once And Future Worker: A Vision For the Renewal Of Work In America, is such a hot read at the moment that it is sold out in print at Amazon (though still available on Kindle), and ranks no. 1 on the Amazon bestseller list of public policy and economic policy books. The New York Times' own David Brooks recently called it "absolutely brilliant."

Cass's book is all about the dignity of work. He writes, "For the individual, work imposes structure on each day and on life in general. It offers the mundane but essential disciplines of timeliness and reliability and hygiene as well as the more complex socialization of collaboration and paying attention to others. It requires people to interact and forges shared experiences and bonds. It promotes goal-setting and long-term planning...Communities that lack work, by contrast, suffer maladies that degrade social capital and lead to persistent poverty. Crime and addiction increase, their participants in turn becoming ever less employable; investments in housing and communal assets decline; a downward spiral is set in motion...while productive activity provides direct benefits to workers, its worth also derives from the dignity and respect that society confers on self-reliance and productive contributions."

The Times may consider the idea of "dignity of work" a platitude, but politicians from John Kennedy through Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton and even arguably Franklin Roosevelt (the Works Progress Administration) have correctly recognized and articulated that it's work — rather than, say, expanded welfare benefit payments for sitting at home and not working — that is essential to the success and, yes, dignity, of American individuals and families. New York Times political reporting would be better if it were less cynical about this sort of thing — less eye-rolling about platitudes — and more earnestly curious.

And don't even get me started about what the word "populist" is doing in the sentence. We had a rule at the New York Sun that alliteration trumped all other rules, so "populist platitude" at least gets some points there in the "p" department. But just because something is popular doesn't necessarily mean it's populist, and vice versa.

The Times reporter who wrote this one is sharp and hardworking, and they are smart to pay attention to Brown's victory in Ohio and to his 2020 prospects. But even good reporters and good story ideas need careful line editing to avoid these kinds of blunders.

A New York Times editorial, "North Korean Nuclear Shell Game," about the Trump administration's North Korean nuclear diplomacy complains about "no deadlines, no verification regime, no penalties for noncompliance," and asserts, "Mr. Trump's special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, has yet to meet a North Korean official more than two months since his appointment."

Never mind the hypocrisy and inconsistency — the Times cheerleads for sketchy nuclear deals with Iran and even with North Korea when they are reached by Democratic administrations, but once a Republican gets into office, all of a sudden the Times editorials sound like they are being ghostwritten by Frank Gaffney.

Never mind that the Times doesn't even acknowledge the Trump administration's significant accomplishment of achieving the safe release of three Americans who had been held hostage by North Korea.

The Times can't even get the basic facts right. Biegun, whose career we've followed since his days working for Benjamin Gilman, in fact has met with North Koreans. He accompanied Secretary of State Pompeo to Pyongyang on October 4. A Bloomberg news account reported, "The Sunday stop in Pyongyang was Pompeo's first chance to introduce his special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, to leaders there." CBS News also reported on Biegun's presence in Pyongyang.

It'll be interesting to see whether the Times runs a correction acknowledging this factual error.

From the latest article in the New York Times' coverage of the Harvard admissions affirmative action case:

Claire Jean Kim, a professor of Asian-American studies at the University of California, Irvine, said the Harvard lawsuit is the "continuation of a historical dynamic that's been around for almost two centuries."

The phenomenon gained particular significance in the mid-20th century, when white people praised the work ethic and ability of Asian-Americans as a way to discredit the struggle of African-Americans. At that time, Japanese- and Chinese-Americans were repeatedly portrayed by politicians and the media, including The New York Times, as docile and industrious.

One of the hyperlinks the Times invokes to support its claim is another New York Times article from a few months ago. It said:

Black and Asian-American people have often been pitted against one another over the years, dating to the mid-20th century, when white people praised the work ethic and ability of Asian-Americans as a way to disparage the African-American struggle.

It seems to me that it's possible to have praised Asian-Americans as hard workers or industrious and to have meant it as genuine praise, not as a way of expressing racism toward blacks. And if the Times is going to make such a serious accusation, in its own editorial voice and without attribution, that praise of Asian-Americans was motivated by anti-black racism, it ought to name multiple, specific examples of that, and supply evidence.

The analogy that comes to my mind is from my JFK, Conservative book, which tells the story of how President Kennedy, after the 1963 March on Washington, met with the organizers, including Martin Luther King Jr., and told them "With all the influence that all you gentlemen have in the Negro community....[you] really have to concentrate in what I think the Jewish community has done on educating their children, on making them stay in school, and all the rest." Kennedy wasn't discrediting or disparaging the blacks; he was trying to give them what he thought was genuinely sound advice. At least that's how I heard it.

It's been a long time in coming since Smartertimes first reported on the trips back in 2014, but the New York Times is finally suspending the money-making, journalist-guided luxury trips it has been running to Iran. The Algemeiner has news of the Times decision.

Of all the angles for the New York Times to choose for a front-page post-election political story, the "vanishing Northeastern Republican" one they used is pretty lame.

The Times blames President Trump: "A Trump-Fueled 'Wipeout' for House Republicans in the Northeast," is the headline.

But the Times has been writing the obituary of Northeastern Republicans since long before Donald Trump became a political force.

Here, for example, is a Times dispatch from 2006:

It was a species as endemic to New England as craggy seascapes and creamy clam chowder: the moderate Yankee Republican.

Dignified in demeanor, independent in ideology and frequently blue in blood, they were politicians in the mold of Roosevelt and Rockefeller: socially tolerant, environmentally enthusiastic, people who liked government to keep its wallet close to its vest and its hands out of social issues like abortion and, in recent years, same-sex marriage.

But this election dealt the already-fading New England Republican an especially strong blow, one that some fear will increase the divide between the two parties nationally by removing a longstanding bridge between them.

Of 22 members of the newly elected House of Representatives from New England, only one is a Republican: Christopher Shays of Connecticut, who eked out a victory while two other Republicans from his state, Representatives Nancy L. Johnson and Rob Simmons, lost to Democrats.

Not only is it an old story, but it also doesn't particularly fit the results in 2018, which saw Republican governors elected in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts, and Republican congressmen Pete King and Lee Zeldin hold on their Long Island congressional seats.

A front-page New York Times news article about the federal lawsuit over Harvard's admissions practices reports, "Harvard has officially permitted students to see their admissions files since 2015, after a group of Stanford students successfully used a federal education law to gain access to their records."

That's not accurate. Harvard permitted students to do this in the early 1990s. Stanford had nothing to do with it. I know this because I got a copy of mine, or at least the summary sheet. Here is coverage from the Crimson at the time. A Harvard student from that era who is a friend of mine and who was my colleague at the New York Sun, Josh Gerstein, recounted the whole story in a recent piece for Politico.

I tackled the underlying substance of the case in a recent column.

From the Jim Rutenberg media column, returned after an absence:

He has succeeded in creating a daily narrative in which he is the central figure," Steve Coll, the dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism and a staff writer at The New Yorker, told me. "And he uses props and invented opposition — whether they are migrants hundreds of miles from the U.S. border or the press right in front of him — to pursue this kind of idea he has about how his populism works."

I don't really follow how the migrant caravan or the press are "props and invented opposition"? They seem to me to be not "invented" — at least not invented by Trump — but, rather, genuine. There really is a caravan of migrants headed for our Southern border. There are photographs of it in the Times and images on television. They don't appear to be actors hired by Trump. Likewise, the press really does seem to oppose Trump, at least to judge by the unusually low ratio of endorsements he received in the presidential election and to judge the periodic surveys of the political views of newsroom personnel. There may be some element of the press that hyped Trump because he was good for ratings or subscription sales, but to judge by the tenor of the coverage, there certainly is an element of opposition in the press, as there is, to some degree, with most presidents. I get how Trump is seizing on these images and situations to turn them to his political advantage, which may be the point that Rutenberg and Coll are trying to make. But describing these situations as "invented" only confirms and reinforces Trump's narrative of an unremittingly hostile press.

From a New York Times staff editorial about how congressional Democrats might work with President Trump after the midterm election:

With Republicans likely to retain control of the Senate, the odds of even a vaguely progressive bill of any real significance making it through the upper chamber are slim. It's hard to imagine Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, allowing his members to come within 100 miles of, say, a costly infrastructure plan.

This isn't actually "hard to imagine" at all. It's easy to imagine. The Times doesn't mention it, but Senator McConnell's wife, Elaine Chao, is the federal transportation secretary. Any more money McConnell appropriates is more money for Chao to spend. Many Republican senators share with Democrats a love for announcing new federal grants to support airports, bridges, bicycle lanes, parking garages, and ferry terminals in their home states. They'd be particularly happy to do that if the infrastructure spending were combined with Davis-Bacon reform that meant government was getting more bang for its infrastructure spending buck.

It's funny, too, that the Times concern with budget deficits, a concern that predictably swells whenever Republicans propose or enact a tax cut, is nowhere to be found when advocating a "costly infrastructure plan."

Under the headline "The Billionaire Who Ruined Sears," the New York Times runs an op-ed piece asserting of Edward Lampert, "In 2005, he merged the rejuvenated Kmart with Sears, then a conservatively run but still thriving nationwide retailer." The deal was announced in 2004, not 2005, and at the time, the New York Times itself described Sears not as thriving. Rather, the Times reported at the time that Sears "has been on the wane for the last 40 years." Said the Times in 2004, "Customer traffic and sales have been sluggish at both Kmart and Sears." The Times article reporting on the deal quoted a marketing professor who said, "both of these companies are faltering." It described Sears as having been "struggling to reinvent itself while larger and more nimble chains, including Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot and Lowe's, spirited away once-loyal Sears customers with better merchandise, better prices or both." It reported of Sears, "by the 1970's its retail fortunes were in decline."

So when Lampert took control of it, the Times described Sears as "on the wane," "faltering," "struggling," and "in decline." To now blame him for having "ruined" it is just weird. One may fault him for having failed, at least so far, to turn it entirely around. But to blame him for having "ruined" a "thriving" retailer is just inaccurate.

A more extended take from me about Sears Holdings, complete with full disclosures, is available here.

A front-page news article in today's New York Times focuses on "how the president demeans women." It takes until the 18th paragraph of the article for the Times to acknowledge, "The president often expresses his ire by comparing women to animals, an effort to dehumanize his opponents that he also uses against men."

I'm not defending Trump's insults, but it does seem relevant — relevant to merit more than a mere brief aside in this Times article — that he also demeans men. Of Senator McCain, Trump tweeted, "Graduated last in his class at Annapolis--dummy!" He called Governor Jeb Bush "low energy Jeb." He called Senator Rubio of Florida "little Marco." He called Vice President Biden "weak, both mentally and physically." He's accused of physically mocking a male reporter for the New York Times, Serge Kovaleski. The Bob Woodward book reported that he described Attorney General Sessions as a "dumb Southerner." He called CNN's Don Lemon "the dumbest man on television." He referred to "little" Jeff Zucker.

A Times article analyzing how the Trump insults of men and women are different, if they are different, might be interesting. But a Times article about "how the president demeans women" without at least a full paragraph about how he demeans everyone just seems like a cheap hit designed for social media sharing by the Times left-leaning, Trump-hating readership.

Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital have concluded that a cardiologist "fabricated or falsified data in 31 published studies that should be retracted," the New York Times reports. The Boston Globe had the story first, on its front page yesterday, but the Times gives no credit to the Globe, to its "Stat News" subsidiary, or to Retraction Watch for breaking the story. That seems kind of lame.