"G.O.P. Finds an Unexpectedly Potent Line of Attack: Immigration," is the headline over a news article in today's Times. The article was interesting, but what made me laugh was the headline. Who was it, exactly, who didn't expect immigration to work as an issue for Trump Republicans? The Democrats? The Trump Republicans who are the ones using the issue? Or the reporters and editors in the Times newsroom and their left-leaning readers? How many more times does this have to happen before it ceases to be unexpected?

The Sunday New York Times magazine also featured an article on the politics of immigration that, as someone who favors increased levels of legal immigration, I also found worth my time. That one had a more straightforward headline: "The Democrats Have An Immigration Problem."

From a Metro section news article about federal criminal charges against doctors prescribing painkillers comes an example of how reporters collaborate with prosecutors to cast accused criminals in the most negative possible light: "Dr. Pietropinto, the psychiatrist who saw people at night in a rented office on Fifth Avenue, wrote thousands of prescriptions for large amounts of oxycodone in exchange for $50 to $100 in cash per visit, the complaint said."

It's highly common for doctors to rent offices rather than own them. It's also highly common for mental health professionals to have some office hours in the evenings so that patients who work or go to school during the daytime are able to see a doctor without missing school or work. There's nothing criminal or nefarious about a psychiatrist seeing people at night in a rented office. Yet the way the article is written, it makes it sound as if renting an office and having evening hours is somehow proof that the doctor is a shady or fly-by-night operator or guilty of a crime.

I'm not defending the doctors — the opioid epidemic is horrible, and going after some doctors for over-prescribing for no legitimate medical reason, if that is indeed what happened here, is a welcome corrective to the error of blaming the whole thing on the Sackler family or on one pharmaceutical company. But if the Times or prosecutors want to demonstrate that the doctors are guilty of a crime, they need to demonstrate that, rather than merely attacking them for doing perfectly legal things, such as renting an office or having evening hours.

In the same category is the article's treatment of the use of cash money. Many modern health insurance policies — including those available under the ObamaCare exchanges that the Times so ardently editorially advocates — feature substantial patient financial responsibility for deductibles, co-pays, and co-insurance. It is not a crime to pay those fees in cash rather than by check or credit card. It may help doctors keep fees lower by avoiding credit-card processing charged by banks. Some patients — the "unbanked," either because of poor credit or illegal immigrant status — may not have credit cards or checking accounts, but may have access to cash. There's a push by the government against cash transactions because they are more difficult for the government to track, but there's no reason for the Times news reporters to cooperate with that.

When the press and prosecutors together pile on like this — faulting people for legal behavior such as renting an office, accepting U.S.-government-issued paper money as tender, having a business that is open in the evenings — it tends to raise doubts about the solidity of their underlying case. If the prosecutors are so sure they have an airtight case against these doctors, why bother with the rest of the nonsense? Maybe it's part of the negotiations leading to an eventual plea deal. But the proper role of the press here is to be a watchdog against prosecutorial excess, not a megaphone for it.

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In a New York Times arts section review by Jason Farago of "Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922," a new exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York, comes a reference to "Belarus, the last dictatorship in Europe." What about Russia? Turkey? Crimea? I suppose Russia and Turkey both are partly in Europe, partly in Asia, but they aren't free countries, at least according to Freedom House, and they are partly in Europe. At least using a geographic definition of Europe.

A New York Times article about a Conde Nast editor-turned-L.A. maitre d refers to "Jeffrey Klein, the young hotelier behind the Sunset Tower."

A January 2017 article about Mr. Klein elsewhere on the internet said he was 48, and a 2011 New York Times report on his commitment ceremony put his age then at 41.

I'm in my 40s myself, so I can't really, in good conscience, personally complain about the Times characterizing Klein as "young." Times readers in their teens, 20s, or 30s, however, might be skeptical about the description of someone in his late 40s as "young." In general, in situations such as this, the Times would be better off just giving someone's age rather than characterizing the person as old or young.

A dispatch from Washington about a bartender who has a charity that helps Cambodia begins:

WASHINGTON — Sambonn Lek, bartender at the St. Regis hotel near the White House, has shaken and stirred for movers and shakers since the Carter administration. At 66, he leads a disappearing fraternity: barkeeps who know their regulars' names and favorite cocktails, and when they drink so much of the latter that they forget the former, find them a ride home.

The Times stylebook entries under "former" and "latter" advise avoiding using them in ways that force the reader to glance back. That would have been wise for some editor to enforce here. The argument for allowing it through, I guess, is that it's clever, I guess, or funny. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that what was causing me to slam on my brakes as a reader here wasn't just the "former...latter' formulation, but the idea of a bartender at what the Times article says is a Marriott-owned St. Regis hotel near the White House serving customers so much to drink that they forget their own names. Maybe I am reading it too literally, but if this is actually happening with any sort of regularity, wouldn't it be better for the bartender to cut them off before they reach that point, rather than getting credited by the Times for finding them a ride home or for being some kind of philanthropist?

Smartertimes is not exactly the Women's Christian's Temperance Union. Not even close. But if some guy or company is regularly facilitating or enabling customers drinking so much that they forget their own names, maybe skip the flattering profile of their philanthropy?

The New York Times is under pressure from its anti-Trump paying readers to be aggressive in calling out presidential lies, or falsehoods. One problem with doing that is the risk of the Times getting it wrong. For example, an initial version of a Times article yesterday by "early morning breaking news reporter" Eileen Sullivan about immigration included the passage, "In a series of Twitter posts, Mr. Trump falsely claimed that crime in Germany is on the rise, and railed against immigration policies in Europe."

As Mickey Kaus pointed out on Twitter, the BBC reported that in Lower Saxony, "regarded as an average state - where police saw an increase of 10.4% in reported violent crimes in 2015 and 2016. Based on figures from the state's interior ministry, which keeps a separate record of alleged crimes by migrants, the report suggested that 92.1% of this increase was attributable to migrants." Reuters reported on a German government study that found, "Violent crime rose by about 10 percent in 2015 and 2016, a study showed. It attributed more than 90 percent of that to young male refugees."

A later version of the Times article deleted the "falsely claimed" language, and instead wrote, "While Mr. Trump's assessment of Germany's crime problems is not accurate —crime in the country is the lowest since 1992, according to the most recent German data available — the brutal murder of a 14-year-old German girl has fueled Ms. Merkel's opponents who are against the country's migration policies that provide entry to some 10,000 asylum seekers each month." The Times didn't issue a formal correction or append one to the story, it just, "stealth edited" it, as it often does, and as the website Newsdiffs.org is useful in tracking. Maybe the key here is the difference between "violent crimes" and overall "crime," in which case, maybe Trump just forgot to include the word "violent." If that's it, it seems a bit like overkill to hammer Trump with "falsely claimed," or maybe even with "not accurate."

I'm not saying all immigrants are criminals, or even that they are more likely than non-immigrants to be criminals, or even if they were more likely that that would justify separating children and parents at the U.S. border. What I am saying is that before the Times uses the phrase "falsely claimed" as attribution in a news article, it should double check to make sure that the claim is actually false rather than merely imprecise. Otherwise people will start writing that the Times falsely claimed the president's claim was false.

Update: The Times also seems to now have broken out a separate "fact check" feature on this claim. It seems to me that the fact check totally misses the point by focusing on comparing crime in 2017 against crime in 2016. That doesn't undermine or render false the idea that violent crime increased in 2015 and 2016 after Germany let in a batch of immigrants from the war in Syria.

"How The Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country" is the online headline over a top-of-the-front-page news article by Hiroko Tabuchi in today's Times. The story is flawed on a number of levels, but one passage I found particularly jarring was this one: "The paucity of federal funding for transit projects means that local ballots are critical in shaping how Americans travel...."

Paucity, according to my authoritative Webster's Second Unabridged dictionary, means "fewness, small number" or "scarcity, dearth, insufficiency." The Federal Transit Administration says it awarded a total of $127,633,817,113 in 24,044 grants over the years 2007 to 2017. That doesn't include $8,330,000,000 in grants or funds awarded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) or the Public Transportation Emergency Relief Program, which added at least another $277,500,000 for transit systems affected by Hurricances Harvey, Irma, and Maria and another $10,400,000,000 for transit operators affected by Hurrican Sandy. If you do that math, it brings the total to $146,641,317,133. Those are just the federal grants — it doesn't count the money the transit agencies collect in fares, or raise by issuing bonds whose interest is exempt from federal income tax, or collect in subsidies from state and local taxpayers.

Advocates of more federal mass transit funding may consider $146 billion over 11 years to be a small number, a "paucity." But for the Times news article, in its own voice, without attribution, to endorse that view is to take a side in a controversy about which the Times is supposed to be a neutral, objective, voice. There may be extraordinary situations in which that abandonment of neutrality is called for in the news columns. But it's not clear to me, at least, that the debate over the proper level of federal funding for mass transit is one of those situations. And even if such an abandonment of neutrality were called for, wouldn't it make a stronger case if the Times were honest about it, and said something like, "Even the $146 billion that the federal government already spent on mass transit in the past decade or so isn't enough to have a functioning system once the transit unions skim off their rake" instead of inaccurately characterizing the $146 billion in federal spending as a "paucity"? Someone reading the article might come away with the impression that there's a paucity of careful editors over there.

The Times has started running a regular feature headlined "The Week in Good News."

This week's installment appears with the introduction, "Sometimes it seems as if we're living under a constant barrage of heavy news. But it isn't all bad out there. This feature is meant to send you into the weekend with a smile, or at least a lighter heart....Here are seven great things we wrote about this week."

One of these "great things" or "good news" meant "to send you into the weekend with a smile" was a Times article about a Macy's at an Alexandria, Va. shopping mall that has been partly converted to a temporary homeless shelter.

I guess it's possible to interpret the fact that the homeless are being sheltered rather than ignored as "good news," but the story itself is so bleak that it's more likely to evoke tears than smiles:

Landmark's original anchor stores either have been bought out, went bankrupt or are clinging to life — like many in the retail business. Last year, 6,985 stores closed in the United States, a record number, according to Coresight Research, a retail analysis and advisory firm. This year, retailers are on a pace to close roughly 10,000 stores.

In its final years of operation, the Landmark's tenants included two dollar stores and a tax preparer. Only the Sears is still operating. A lone, blue inflatable figure dances on the store's roof, beckoning shoppers.

There had been plans to revamp the mall by returning it to its roots as an open-air shopping destination. But that proposal never got off the ground, after its former owner General Growth Properties filed for bankruptcy in 2009, and the mall was sold....

Jahlil and his two brothers are sharing a windowless room at the shelter after their mother fell behind on rent....

As Ms. Smith waited to move into her new room, the electricity cut out to a portion of the shelter and the staff set up battery powered camping lanterns to light the way for movers....

The accommodations are sparse and some residents could not hide their disappointment that the bedrooms do not have windows.

We're supposed to smile? At the news that what used to be a prosperous shopping mall that generated sales-tax revenue and provided lots of jobs is now mostly abandoned except for a homeless shelter that provides windowless rooms and unreliable electricity to people who, even in a low-unemployment economy, can't afford to put a roof over their own heads?

I get the instinct of the Times to want to identify some "good news" stories to attract readers who find the news in general to be so grim that they'd rather tune it out. But this one really seemed to me like a stretch, or scraping the bottom of the barrel, or proof that the Times would generally do better if it stuck to just delivering the news rather than characterizing it as "good" or "bad" or advising readers on whether to greet that news with a smile or with a frown.

If the Times editors can't understand this point, they might consider a thought experiment: Would it count as "good news" if the Washington bureau and Jerusalem bureau of the New York Times were abandoned because of the financial pressure faced by the newspaper, and if those office spaces were partially repurposed as homeless shelters?

For a textbook example of bad use of numbers in a news article, consider this, from a Times front-of-the-business section dispatch about a change in leadership at Verizon:

Mr. McAdam, who served six years in the Navy's Civil Engineer Corps before embarking on his career, became Verizon's chief executive in August 2011. During his tenure, he took big steps to prepare the company for the industry's current upheaval. In that time, Verizon's share price has increased nearly 40 percent, to $49.01.

Verizon, like many utility stocks, pays a dividend. At this writing, the annual dividend yield is 4.8%, according to Yahoo Finance. Does the Times "nearly 40 percent" figure assume dividends were reinvested in Verizon stock? Or not? The Times doesn't say, but it looks to me as if they are just not counting the dividends at all, which is a huge distortion, because those dividends are real money in shareholder pockets. If you count reinvesting the dividends, the stock performance from August 2011 to now is more like 87%, not "nearly 40%." Beyond that, the "nearly 40%" figure includes no basis for comparison. The S&P 500 Index was up about 115% during this period, by my calculations, so either "nearly 40%" or even 87% under-performed that benchmark. Maybe there's a more sensible benchmark — some telecommunications or utility index, or some competitor. Compare it to something, though. Otherwise that "nearly 40 percent" figure provides not much meaningful information to a reader.

May 13, 2018: Front-page New York Times article about a suicide at Hamilton College.

May 29, 2018: Front-page New York Times article about a suicide in Prospect Park.

June 6, 2018: Front-page New York Times article about suicide of handbag designer Kate Spade, accompanied by lots and lots and lots of additional Times coverage.

June 8, 2018: Chef and writer and television personality Anthony Bourdain reportedly kills himself in his hotel room.

Reporting on suicides is a notoriously delicate thing to do, because while a news organization doesn't want to ignore a leading cause of death, it doesn't want to inspire copycats, either, and peer-reviewed published research shows that print coverage of suicide does precisely that. I'm not here blaming the Times for contributing to these suicides, but the coverage is something the editors may want to consider and review carefully given the current situation.

"Former Senate Aide Is Charged As Obsession Over Leaks Boils" is the headline over a front-page New York Times article that reports about the arrest of James Wolfe, who was director of security at the Senate Intelligence Committee. The jump headline inside the paper is "Ex-Senate Aide Is Charged Amid Obsession Over Leaks."

The headline's spin of the narrative as demonstrating an "obsession over leaks" is odd. The Times article discloses that Wolfe had a three-year romantic relationship with a national security and law enforcement reporter, Ali Watkins, who is now employed by the New York Times. The Times article says that Wolfe is 57, though the Justice Department press release announcing his indictment says he is 58. The Times article doesn't give Watkins' age, but a news article from 2014 describes her as a 22-year-old senior at Temple University. The Times article says Wolfe is charged with lying to the FBI about the relationship.

The Times has no problem — in fact, it is leading the charge — in having Trump administration or campaign officials prosecuted for allegedly lying to the FBI in attempts to cover up crimes. But when it comes to its own sources being caught for that sort of thing, the headline is "obsession." Why don't the headlines over the Mueller articles read "...Amid Special Counsel's Obsession Over Russia"?

The Times article concedes that Trump's pursuit of leakers isn't new. "The seizure suggested that prosecutors under the Trump administration will continue the aggressive tactics employed under President Barack Obama," the article says.

Perhaps some Times editor agreed with me that the "obsession" headline was spinning too hard in favor of the Times. For later editions, the print headline was apparently changed to a more neutral "Former Senate Aide Is Charged; Times Reporter's Records Seized."

Anyway, I'm all for newsgathering, but it doesn't seem to me to indicate an "obsession" for the Justice Department or the rest of the executive branch to be somewhat disturbed that the director of security at the Senate Intelligence Committee would be lying to the FBI about his relations with a scoop-getting reporter.

I will say, in Wolfe's defense, that he is charged with violating three counts of 18 USC 1001. That is the federal law that provides for a fine or up to five years in prison for anyone who "knowingly and willfully" makes any materially false statement or representation "in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States." If the indictment causes news organizations to take a principled new look at that statute — which was also used against Martha Stewart, and Paul Manafort, and was raised against Hillary Clinton — then that would be a wonderful thing.

As a New York Sun editorial put it:

The law has been on the books since 1863, but it was amended and expanded by Congress in 1934 as the New Deal required more federal disclosures. Today, Section 1001 is well known as dangerous territory by legal experts on all sides of the American political spectrum, and it may well be worth a skeptical re-examination by Congress.

"Even in our age of ever expanding federal power, the reach of this statute and the discretion it lodges in prosecutors is awesome," wrote a veteran federal prosecutor, Solomon Wisenberg, in an article about the law. Mr. Wisenberg, a conservative who served as deputy independent counsel in the Whitewater case and who is now in private practice in Washington, wrote, "The vast majority of federal agents and attorneys are honorable people who would not intentionally abuse this statute....But the potential for abuse of this statute is great, even for normally honest people."

His qualms were shared by a liberal Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who, in a concurring opinion in the 1996 Supreme Court case Brogan v. United States, warned of "the sweeping generality" of Section 1001's language.

Justice Ginsburg wrote: "The prospect remains that an overzealous prosecutor or investigator — aware that a person has committed some suspicious acts, but unable to make a criminal case — will create a crime by surprising the suspect, asking about those acts, and receiving a false denial."

It was a remarkably sagacious warning, as that scenario that Justice Ginsburg warns of bears a certain resemblance to the one in which Ms. Stewart finds herself, with the federal prosecutors unable to make a criminal case against her for insider trading, but nonetheless finding something to charge her with.

In many cases, prosecutors will use their discretion to avoid filing such charges. It's certainly hard to think of another case in which a person has been prosecuted for violating this section alone, without also being prosecuted for an underlying criminal act. The closest thing people seem to be able to remember is the matter of President Clinton's secretary of housing and urban development, Henry Cisneros, who paid a $10,000 fine and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the duration and amount of payments he made to a former mistress.

Justice Ginsburg wrote, "the Department of Justice has long noted its reluctance to approve §1001 indictments for simple false denials made to investigators." ...

A dispatch from London about race in admissions to Oxford appears in the Times under the byline of Alan Cowell and with additional reporting credit from "Aurelien Breeden from Paris, Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome, and Melissa Eddy and Christopher F. Schuetze from Berlin," for a grand total of five named Times staffers on an 1,100-word article.

The Times reports:

For some, the figures showed only halting progress: About 3 percent of the British population is black, according to the most recent census, but only 1.9 percent of the roughly 3,200 students admitted to Oxford in 2017 identified as black Britons.

That was an increase of less than a percentage point from 2013, when 1.1 percent of British undergraduates at Oxford identified as black, a subset of what the university called "black and minority ethnic" students, including those of Asian and mixed heritage, whose share of admissions rose to 17.9 percent last year, from 13.9 percent in 2013.

Well, "halting" is one way to look at it, a way reflected in the Times article. But another way to look at it is that the increase of "less than a percentage point" — to 1.9 percent from 1.1 percent — nonetheless reflects 73% growth over four years. If that trend continues, the "halting" description will soon seem inaccurate. A Times editor might argue that the "For some" part of the sentence excuses the rest of it — after all, "some" people really do see it that way. But the prominence in the article of the placement of that interpretation might cause a reader to suspect that those "some" include the Times editors and reporters, who are using the "for some" formulation as a thin cover to insert their own opinions into what's supposed to be a straight news article. Adjectives and adverbs — "halting," "reasonably" — and statistics are warning signs for editors. Or at least for some.

Incidentally, the Times also provides a baseline for comparison for the black students — "About 3 percent of the British population is black" — but not for the other categories. The CIA World Factbook says the U.K. population is 87.2% white, so if the CIA is counting the same way Oxford is, it's possible that at 17.9 % or 13.9%, minorities are actually over-represented at Oxford.

Reviewing the new PBS documentary "The Chinese Exclusion Act," directed by Ric Burns and Li-Shin Yu, New York Times television critic Mike Hale writes:

You could reasonably ask why a non-Asian-American filmmaker like Mr. Burns should be the driving force in such a prominent telling of an Asian-American story. The answer, beyond the quality of the work, lies in the inevitable advantage that established figures like him and, in the case of "Becoming American," Bill Moyers have in raising money.

Some editor could have improved that first sentence by deleting the word "reasonably." Another possible answer is that the story of the Chinese Exclusion Act isn't exclusively "an Asian-American story" but that it is also an American story. And yet another possible answer is that while members of minority groups may have some advantages in telling stories about their own group, outsiders may also have advantages, such as a fresh perspective or an easier path to telling the story in a way that people outside the group can relate to. Bernard Lewis, for example, was a great historian of Islam without being a Muslim himself. It's not clear to me, at least, that it is a reasonable assumption that all prominent stories about minority groups need to exclude non-members of the minority group from participating as driving forces. I was glad to see Mr. Hale rebut the idea, but I think the word "reasonably" ceded too much ground.

As far as access to capital is concerned, some editor could have improved the second sentence by deleting the word "inevitable." Asian-American filmmakers may now have a harder time capital-raising than Ric Burns or Bill Moyers. But Ric Burns isn't as famous or established a fimmaker as his older, better-known brother Ken. And some day that situation may change. It's not "inevitable."

June 5 at 7:15 p.m. I'll be participating in a panel discussion in New York City on the topic of "The New York Times and the Jews." Advance tickets are required and are available here. If you are interested in this topic, I hope to see you there.

A correction in today's New York Times reads: "Because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about the European Union's response to the recent poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter misstated when a chemical agent was last used on European soil. The poisoning marked the first use of a chemical agent on European soil since — not before — the Second World War."

It's always risky to declare that something is the "first." Aleksandr Litvinenko was reportedly murdered with polonium in London in 2006. Georgi Markov was reportedly murdered with ricin in London in 1978. There were credible if not completely conclusive reports that the Serbs used chemical weapons in Bosnia in the 1990s. All three of those happened since World War II, making the Times claim that the recent poisoning is the "first" since World War II worthy of a second correction.