Under the headline, "Bookstores Stoke Trump Resistance With Action, Not Just Words," the New York Times has a 1,300-word article, accompanied by four photographs, about how bookstores are taking action against President Trump.

There's not a word anywhere in the article about how one of the left's grievances against Trump is that he might appoint conservative judges who agree with the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, that the First Amendment gives businesses some significant latitude to participate in politics free of government interference. There's a certain irony, or hypocrisy, here that seems lost on the Times. The left doesn't seem to have problems with businesses getting involved in politics when it is, say, bookstores organizing anti-Trump rallies. But when the business is, say, Koch Industries or some other company advancing the interests of its shareholders, or Citizens United advancing the interests of its members, then the idea that corporations have free speech rights is subjected to all sorts of left-wing denunciation and mockery. It is a double standard. Either businesses should be able to engage in politics, or they shouldn't. But the idea that it's okay for left-wing bookstores to engage in politics, but not for libertarian or conservative businesses to do the same, is inconsistent.

Do the editors of the New York Times and the art critics even read their own newspaper?

Forgive the question, but it's prompted by this juxtaposition:

The New York Times, January 26, 2017, "Federal Agencies Told to Halt External Communications":

Longtime employees at three of the agencies — including some career environmental regulators who conceded that they remained worried about what President Trump might do on policy matters — said such orders were not much different from those delivered by the Obama administration as it shifted policies from the departing White House of George W. Bush. They called reactions to the agency memos overblown. On Wednesday, Douglas Ericksen, a spokesman for the E.P.A., said that grants had been only briefly frozen for review, and that they would be restarted by Friday.

"I've lived through many transitions, and I don't think this is a story," said a senior E.P.A. career official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media on the matter. "I don't think it's fair to call it a gag order. This is standard practice. And the move with regard to the grants, when a new administration comes in, you run things by them before you update the website."

The New York Times, January 27, 2017, "'Perpetual Revolution' Shows Artists Shaping Their Times," by Times art critic Holland Cotter, who regularly injects political assumptions into art criticism:

Instagram pictures by the Native American photographer Camille Seaman document a protest in progress against the laying of a fuel pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota....

Here we're in breaking-news territory. The collage, with its miniature banners and countless, tightly packed figures, looks like a flashback, or flash-forward, to the recent Women's March. Ms. Seaman's photographs are whiplash reminders that, in his first week in office as president, Donald J. Trump not only ordered a go-ahead for the pipeline but also imposed a communications blackout on the E.P.A.

You'd be hard-pressed to find any relief to this grim picture...

So the Times news section, in an article by the reporter whose job is to cover the EPA in Washington is telling us the EPA situation is standard practice and maybe even not a story, but the Times art critic, from New York, who knows nothing about the situation, is busy insisting in the middle of an art review that this is a "grim picture" from which "you'd be hard pressed to find any relief." Well, relief could be found simply by reading the fact-based coverage available in the Times news section. But the Times art critic, Mr. Cotter, and his editor seem determined to avoid finding any relief — or providing any to the section's readers. Mr. Cotter and his editor prefer instead to fuel the panic that prevails among the Times readership, regardless of whether this specific anxiety about Mr. Trump is anchored in any factual grounding.

[Updated to correct the spelling of the art critic's last name.]

A column by David Brooks about Ronald Reagan includes this passage: "When he erred it was often on the utopian side of things, believing that tax cuts could pay for themselves, believing that he and Mikhail Gorbachev could shed history and eliminate all nuclear weapons."

The two big Reagan tax cuts were enacted in 1981 and 1986.

Here are the federal revenue receipts numbers for the relevant years, according to the Office of Management and Budget historical tables archived from the Obama administration:

In "current dollars":

1979: $463 billion

1980: $517 billion

1981: $599 billion

1982: $618 billion

1983: $601 billion

1984: $666 billion

1985: $734 billion

1986: $769 billion

1987: $854 billion

1988: $909 billion

Here it is in what the OMB calls "constant (FY 2009) dollars," which is a way of adjusting for inflation:

1979: $1.3 trillion

1980: $1.3 trillion

1981: $1.4 trillion

1982: $1.3 trillion

1983: $1.2 trillion

1984: $1.3 trillion

1985: $1.4 trillion

1986: $1.4 trillion

1987: $1.5 trillion

1988: $1.6 trillion

Anyone without ideological blinders on should be able to look at these columns of numbers and realize that federal revenue grew during the Reagan administration even as tax rates were cut. The economic growth effects of the tax cuts helped the government revenues increase, on both a nominal and an inflation-adjusted basis, even though the rates were reduced. To dismiss this as "utopian" or an instance of Reagan having "erred" is itself an error; if anyone is in error here it is Mr. Brooks, not President Reagan.

As for the accusation that the elimination of nuclear weapons is a utopian error, the evidence on that isn't in as decisively as the evidence on the Reagan tax cuts is, but even there Mr. Brooks seems off-base. Reagan's alleged "utopianism" on the point is shared by such legendarily realistic strategic thinkers as George P. Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, and Sam Nunn. Back during the Reagan administration, the Times editorialists were criticizing missile defense (a now well-proven technology with bipartisan support) as utopian, and faulting Reagan for abandoning the zero option on nuclear missiles to pursue what the Times considered a missile defense fantasy. These days, the Times editorialists have been slightly critical of President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry for failing to move fast enough toward Obama's stated goal of eliminating nuclear weapons.

What's important for our point is that even in a column devoted to praising Reagan in comparison to President Trump, even in a column by what passes for a token conservative or at least center-right columnist at the New York Times, David Brooks manages to sneak in a totally unjustified cheap shot or two at the Gipper. Would it be a utopian error on my part to hope the Times can ever stop this sort of nonsense? Probably the odds are better that 30 years from now some New York Times columnist is waxing nostalgic over how President Trump was such a reasonable moderate in comparison to whatever newly elected Republican president the Times is trying to demonize. That is, if the Times even still exists in 30 years; the paper's endurance that far into the future itself might be a fantasy, either of the utopian or dystopian variety, depending on one's view of the matter.

Jim Dwyer gets an entire New York Times column out of condemning Nike for slashing sneakers and clothing and trashing it rather than donating it, un-damaged, to the poor. He writes:

every single shoe had been slashed. That was precisely how H&M disposed of its garments — rendered unwearable with blades and big hole punchers...

Many retailers will destroy garments that cannot be sold in order to prevent expensive brand-name products from entering society at low or no cost. Some companies simply do not want their products — or even knockoffs of their goods — to be worn by people who are obviously unable to afford them.

What stunned me about this column was the hypocrisy of it, and the apparent lack of awareness of the hypocrisy of it. The Times, after all, is stuck with thousands — maybe even tens of thousands — of copies at the end of each day of unsold newsstand copies. The system for being reimbursed for these "returns," as they are known in the industry, generally requires the newsstand operators to rip off the front page of the newspaper, or the top of it, using a "blade" just like the one that Mr. Dwyer is so bent out of shape about when it comes to the sneakers.

Where's the column condemning the New York Times company for not distributing its unused newspapers for free the next day to homeless shelters, or for not putting them on sale the next day at a discounted price like so many day-old doughnuts?

A Times critic might say the newspaper is barely worth any money on the day it is published, let alone once the news is old. But I actually find that plenty of Times content — whether it is the food or science and health section, or the book review, or the magazine — ages pretty well. There might be an audience that finds it useful. By pulping day-old newspapers rather than distributing them to "society at low or no cost," the Times itself sure looks like it's engaging in the same practice as Nike and H&M — or at least something similar enough that the columnist should devote a sentence or two to explaining why Nike's practice and H&M's deserve condemnation, while the Times practice deserves to be ignored. Otherwise, it looks like a double standard, a case of the Times holding companies it covers to a higher standard than it follows in its own business practices.

The lead, front-page news article in today's New York Times begins:

WASHINGTON — President Trump upended America's traditional, bipartisan trade policy on Monday as he formally abandoned the ambitious, 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership brokered by his predecessor and declared an end to the era of multinational trade agreements that defined global economics for decades.

The headline over the continuation of the article inside the paper is "Upending Bipartisan Trade Policy, Trump Abandons Trans-Pacific Deal."

Nowhere in the lengthy article accusing Mr. Trump of "upending bipartisan trade policy" is any acknowledgment whatsoever of the fact that both of Mr. Trump's Democratic opponents, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, also publicly opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In other words, if the trade policy was "bipartisan," so was the opposition to it. The article makes Mr. Trump sound like some sort of outside-the-mainstream extremist, when in fact the opposition to the TPP was common, across party lines, in the recent presidential campaign. It would have been a better story if the Times had acknowledged that fact rather than omitting it.

The Times willingness to criticize Mr. Trump on the issue in a skewed way extends also to the editorial page, which published an editorial faulting Mr. Trump for withdrawing from the TPP. This is pretty humorous, because until Mr. Trump took the office, the Times itself hadn't been exactly beating the drum in favor of the agreement. It published an editorial about the pact in 2015 that is one of the limpest examples of the editorial craft in the history of editorial writing. The Times enthusiasm for this trade treaty is newfound and appears to relate more to the paper's aversion to Trump than to any enthusiasm for unfettered trade; back in the summer of 2016, a Times editorial said, "While trade is not the cause of all or even much of the wage stagnation or increased income inequality in the past several decades, there are real problems with trade agreements, as Hillary Clinton and her former rival Senator Bernie Sanders have pointed out."

Got that? In the Summer of 2016, the Times editorial position was to agree with Clinton and Sanders that 'there are real problem with trade agreements." But now that it is January 2017, the editorial position is to condemn Mr. Trump for protectionism for scrapping the agreement. It's almost enough to make you think that what they really care about isn't trade but Trump.

I personally favor the TPP and am sorry both that Mr. Trump scrapped it and that the Republican Congress and President Obama didn't enact it last year. But even as someone who agrees with the Times' current view on the substance of the thing, I find the slanted, breathless nature of the news coverage and the selective outrage of the editorial board's position to be just really cringe-worthy.

The New York Times editorial responding to President Trump's inaugural address makes one wonder if the editorial writers at the Times ever actually read the news articles that appear in their own newspaper.

The Times writes:

One longed, as Mr. Trump spoke, for a special kind of simultaneous translation, one that would convert Trumpian myth into concrete fact. It might have noted, when Mr. Trump sounded like a politician from the 1980s in promising to "get our people off welfare and back to work," that the number of people receiving federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits fell by more than 70 percent, to 1.2 million, between 1996 and 2016. As Mr. Trump spoke about the disappearance of jobs, it would have noted that the unemployment rate has fallen from 10 percent in 2009, the height of the recession, to less than 5 percent....

Equally misleading was his characterization that Washington has "subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military." The United States leads the world in military spending, allocating more than the next seven nations combined, including China and Russia. Current spending, in fact, is far higher than it was before the 9/11 attacks.

Mr. Trump waxed apocalyptic in imagining the prevalence of crime in the nation's cities.

If anyone is being "misleading" or engaging in "myth" here, it's not Mr. Trump, but the Times editorialists.

Let's take the Times claims one by one.

Welfare: It's true that the number of TANF recipients is down. But TANF is just one among dozens of welfare programs. The rolls, and costs, of those other programs have soared in part because, unlike TANF, they haven't been reformed. The number of food stamp recipients, for example, soared to 44 million in 2016 from 25 million in 1996, and spending on the program reached $71 billion in 2016 from $24 million in 1996, according to the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the program. Spending on Medicaid, the government health program for the poor, soared to $545 billion in 2015 from $152 billion in 1996, and the number of participants in the program grew to 69 million from 32 million. The number of people receiving federal disability benefits has soared to about 7 million, up from about 5 million in 1996. That program now costs about $143 billion a year, plus another $85 billion for Medicare health coverage for disabled individuals.

Unemployment: The Times mocks Mr. Trump for his "misleading" talk about the disappearance of jobs. But the same newspaper that carries the mocking editorial also carries a copy of the inaugural address annotated by New York Times economic policy reporter Binyamin Appelbaum, who writes, "much of the country has stagnated economically....Trade with China cost the United States about a million factory jobs from 2000 to 2007, according to one recent study.... It's the jobs that have gone away."

Military: It's true, as the Times points out, that defense spending, adjusted for inflation using the government's methods, is higher now than it was before September 11, 2001. But it's also lower than it was in 1987, 1988, or 1989, at the end of the Reagan military buildup. President Obama's defense secretary, Ashton Carter, warned in a letter to the editor of the Times of "dangerous absurdities like having to curtail soldiers' training, ships' sailing and airplanes' flying. Our military will therefore not be fully ready to meet contingencies." Another Obama defense secretary, Leon Panetta, was quoted in a Times news article using words like "disastrous" and "unacceptable" to describe impending military budget cuts.

Crime: Again, if Mr. Trump is apocalyptic about urban crime, maybe it's because he's been reading the excellent New York Times series on "Murder in the 4-0," including the front-page article describing how "witnesses cower behind triple-locked doors, more fearful of a gunman's crew than confident in the Police Department's ability to protect them." Or maybe Mr. Trump read the page one news article in the Times on December 29, 2016, that began:

CHICAGO — The nation's third-largest city will end 2016 with a surging murder rate, a demoralized and distrusted police force and a weary populace that has become inured to daily reports of shootings.

More than 750 people have been murdered in Chicago in 2016, the police said, a 58 percent increase over last year and the highest total since 1997. There have been more than 3,500 shootings in the city this year.

Over Christmas weekend, at least 60 people were shot, 11 fatally, according to The Chicago Tribune. Two teenage girls were among those shot.

For the Times to fault Mr. Trump for "imagining" an urban crime wave when the newspaper is itself placing news articles like those ones on its own front page is just bizarre. It's the newspaper's editorial writers attacking the president for having taken seriously the news that the newspaper's own reporters are producing.

It's one thing to differ with Mr. Trump's proposed solutions to the nation's problems. But for the Times editorialists to pretend that joblessness, crime, and welfare dependency are not at levels that are cause for concern is a kind of refusal to reckon with the facts that itself deserves the descriptors — "imagining," "myth," "misleading"— that the Times heaps upon Mr. Trump's speech.

A news article in the New York Times the other day claimed that the newspaper is "trying to forge a stronger connection to the large bloc of voters who swept Mr. Trump to the presidency." I wrote that it was "an open question" whether the paper, or its editors, were actually even trying to do that.

One way, for sure, to fail at making that "connection" is to insert political asides into articles that are not related to politics — especially when those asides make unwarranted and sweeping assumptions about the political views of readers. For example, the arts section of the Times prominently features a review by Holland Carter of an exhibit at the Morgan Library. The exhibit is about the poet Emily Dickinson. Mr. Carter writes that the exhibit "instantly turns the Morgan into a pilgrimage site, a literary Lourdes, a place to come in contact with one aspect of American culture that truly can claim greatness, which we sure can use in an uh-oh political moment."

Later in the piece, Mr. Carter writes about the Civil War: "like Walt Whitman, who began working as the equivalent of a psychiatric nurse in a military hospital in Washington, Dickinson seems to have been caught up in the emergency-room atmosphere that gripped the nation, a mood probably not entirely different from the one found in a divided America now."

For the "large bloc of voters who swept Mr. Trump to the presidency," today isn't "an uh-oh political moment," but a moment of great promise — and a relief to be rid of President Obama.

Likewise, in asserting that the Civil War mood in America was "probably not entirely different from the one found in a divided America now," the word "probably" sure does a lot of work. As anxious and upset as Mr. Trump's opponents are today, it seems like a stretch to compare it to the grief and loss of the Civil War era, when 750,000 Americans died in the conflict at a time when the American population was about 31 million.

These political points aren't argued by the Times critic — they are just stated as kind of self-evidently shared assumptions.

If anyone is having an "uh-oh political moment" here, it is the Times itself, whose journalists seem so stuck in their mental bubble that they can't conceive of the possibility that any Times reader might be happy about the election's outcome or not view the current moment as one that is as dire as the Civil War.

A public memo issued yesterday by the top two editors at the New York Times promised "fewer editors at The Times."

To judge by this morning's newspaper, the plan has already been implemented.

At least two Times articles could have benefited from some more editing.

The first appears atop the arts section. Online, the headline is "Museum Trustee, a Trump Donor, Supports Groups That Deny Climate Change." It's a long, one-sided attack on the American Museum of Natural History for the sin of allowing a conservative donor. Rebekah Mercer, to serve as one of 49 members of the board of trustees.

The Times article includes this sentence about the museum's president, Ellen V. Futter: "Ms. Futter would not comment on the calls for Ms. Mercer to step down or what brought her to the board, declining to discuss the activities of a specific trustee."

The reference to "the calls for Ms. Mercer to step down" stopped me in my tracks as a reader, because the article hadn't yet reported that there were any such calls.

The same article also gave an inaccurate report of President-elect Trump's views on climate change. It reports:

The climate change positions of people surrounding Mr. Trump are being closely scrutinized as he takes office, partly because the president-elect has described climate change as a hoax, and vowed to "cancel" the Paris climate accord and to undo President Obama's Clean Power Plan.

The "hoax" hyperlink links to another Times article that includes no original report of the "hoax" comment, but just another copied and pasted parade-of-horrors context paragraph:

Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to "cancel" the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama's signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a "war on coal."

The "hoax" link in that Times article goes to a Trump tweet from 2012 that doesn't use the word "hoax" but does say, "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."

The Times doesn't say why it finds the 2012 tweet worthy of constant repetition, but why it doesn't report Mr. Trump's November 2016 interview with the Times in which he said he has "a totally open mind" on the topic. From that interview:

JAMES BENNET, editorial page editor: When you say an open mind, you mean you're just not sure whether human activity causes climate change? Do you think human activity is or isn't connected?

TRUMP: I think right now ... well, I think there is some connectivity. There is some, something. It depends on how much. It also depends on how much it's going to cost our companies.

That is a lot different than simply calling climate change a hoax. But it sure seems like the Times would rather provide its liberal readers with fodder for their anxiety than provide an accurate, up-to-date characterization that reflects the nuances of Mr. Trump's views.

The Times article includes quotes from the Sierra Club and Greenpeace and from two other critics condemning Ms. Mercer, but not a single quote from anyone defending her presence on the board. I would have been happy to have been quoted saying it is totally ridiculous, closed-minded and intolerant for anyone to talk about disqualifying anyone from serving on the 49-person board of that particular museum on the grounds that she had given money to some conservative policy organizations. But no one from the Times called me for comment. Nor are there any quotes in the article from representatives of the conservative groups she gave money to, though there are two paragraphs devoted to an op-ed piece that ran in the Wall Street Journal in 1997 by someone Ms. Mercer once gave $15,000 in campaign contributions to.

The whole Times piece is a sloppy confection of guilt by association and one-sidedness. It needed more editing, not less.

A similar problem afflicts Thomas Friedman's op-ed page column. Mr. Friedman writes:

What if Trump — instead of calling Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer "head clown" — had tweeted: "Chuck, you are THE MAN!!! Top Democrat now that Obama's gone!!! You love to deal. Send me your best health care experts and we'll fix this thing together in 24 hours, so every American gets better, cheaper care. We'll both be heroes (well, me just a little bit more). Call me!!!"

Well, for one thing, that tweet would have been 138 characters over the limit.

But for another thing, Mr. Friedman totally ignores that Mr. Trump did praise Mr. Schumer. On November 20, Mr. Trump reacted to Mr. Schumer's election as Senate Democratic leader by tweeting, "I have always had a good relationship with Chuck Schumer. He is far smarter than Harry R and has the ability to get things done. Good news!"

Mr. Trump also announced that, on Schumer's advice, he would keep a former Schumer aide, Preet Bharara, as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. I wrote a whole column on the budding and dangerous Trump-Schumer bromance.

It was only after Schumer came under pressure from left-wing activists angry at him for what they saw as collaborating with or normalizing Mr. Trump, and gave a combative speech on the Senate floor that took Mr. Trump by surprise, that Mr. Trump turned on Mr. Schumer.

From Mr. Trump's perspective, Mr. Friedman and his ilk aren't going to give Mr. Trump any credit for the November 20 tweet. They just ignore it. So one almost wonders, from Mr. Trump's point of view, what is the point of even bothering.

Mr. Friedman writes, "Many who voted against Trump would have given him a second look had he surprised them with generosity and grace. He did just the opposite. Sad."

Many of the Trump voters who distrust the New York Times would have given that paper a second look had it surprised them with generosity and grace. Instead the newspaper has done just the opposite, doubling down on reflexive hostility to the incoming administration, unmoored to basic standards of journalistic accuracy, balance, or fairness. Sad, indeed.

A third article in today's Times reports that "Within The Times's newsroom... the impending staff cuts have some employees on edge." It also says the Times is "trying to forge a stronger connection to the large bloc of voters who swept Mr. Trump to the presidency." If the newspaper really wants to do that — an open question, in my view — it's going to need to perform better than it did in these two pieces.

The New York Times has an editorial condemning President-elect Trump for naming his son in law, Jared Kushner, as a senior White House adviser. It cites "the real dangers posed by nepotism." (The Times, of all people, should know.)

"There's a good reason for anti-nepotism laws," the Times editorial says, warning that when relatives are hired, "they undermine the public's faith that important posts are being filled with the best possible candidates."

Also, "it upends delicate dynamics, as senior staff members keep their mouths shut rather than contradict a trusted relative of their boss."

The concerns the Times editorial raises about nepotism in government might well also apply to, say, a publicly traded company. The Times editorial draws no distinction between nepotism in government and in corporate America.

That's odd, because if there were ever a company familiar with the way that nepotism undermines "faith that important posts are being filled with the best possible candidates" or "upends delicate dynamics," it would be the New York Times Company itself.

As the Times Company's most recent proxy statement put it:

Certain Members of the Ochs-Sulzberger Family Employed by the Company During 2015. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. was employed as Chairman of the Company and Publisher of The New York Times. Michael Golden was employed as Vice Chairman. See "Compensation of Executive Officers" for a description of their compensation.Michael Greenspon, who was employed as general manager, news services and international, was paid $455,361 and received time-vested restricted stock units with a grant date fair value of $35,721. David Perpich, who was employed as general manager, new digital products, and senior vice president, product, was paid $419,508 and received restricted stock units with a grant date fair value of $32,626. Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, who was employed as senior editor for strategy and an associate editor for The New York Times, was paid $197,880 and received time-vested restricted stock units with a grant date fair value of $6,203.

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., Michael Golden and the mother of Carolyn D. Greenspon are cousins. Michael Greenspon is Carolyn D. Greenspon's brother. David Perpich is the son of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.'s sister and Joseph Perpich, a Trustee. Arthur Gregg Sulzberger is Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.'s son.

Or as the Times news article announcing that Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, then 36, had been named deputy publisher put it:

"The Times," Arthur Hays Sulzberger said in 1963 when he named his son publisher, "is a family enterprise."... Mr. Sulzberger, the son of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who took over as publisher in 1992, was one of three candidates, all cousins. The others were Sam Dolnick, 35, who oversees many initiatives at The Times, including some in virtual reality and podcasts; and David Perpich, 39, who works on the business side and helped put in place The Times's paywall and other subscription products.

The Times manages to issue this editorial denouncing the ill-effects of nepotism without a scintilla of apparent self-awareness or self-deprecating humor. It's almost enough to make a reader nostalgic for the days when the editorial page was edited by Andrew Rosenthal, the son of Timesman A.M. Rosenthal.

Maybe it's possible to make a case that nepotism is no problem in a family business, even a publicly listed one with non-family shareholders, but is a problem in government. I can conceive of such a case myself. But the Times doesn't even try to make that case, instead criticizing Mr. Trump's hiring of Mr. Kushner by citing sweeping principles that would seem to apply just as well to the Times itself.

Mr. Trump might respond to the Times editorial with a note to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.: "Dear Arthur: I'll agree not to hire any of my relatives the minute you agree to fire all of yours. Sincerely, Donald Trump."

In an egregious example of bad journalism, the New York Times kicks Judith Rodin on her way out as president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

A news article by David Gelles of the Times reports:

In recent years, the foundation has focused on the themes of "resilience" and "inclusive economies." That has resulted in programs aimed at establishing "resilience officers" in 100 cities to focus on disaster relief and a plan that is sending 100,000 inner-city students to see the musical "Hamilton."

These efforts have struck critics as public relations stunts more than meaningful agents of change. And Ms. Rodin has drawn fire for spending too much time with corporate partners and not enough time with the recipients of grants.

"Has drawn fire" is an example of the passive voice that is a reliable indicator of Times bias. Who is firing? "Critics" that the Times doesn't bother naming or quoting for its readers, let alone independently evaluating the credibility of. Passing along this criticism without providing a response from Ms. Rodin or her defenders or without any apparent attempt to evaluate the validity of the criticism is basically a default by the Times from its responsibility to readers. It's like Donald Trump tweeting "people are saying" or "I'm hearing." If the criticism is true, then the Times shouldn't be afraid to assert it in its own voice, or to name the people who are making it, or hyperlink to articles where the criticism was made. If the criticism is not grounded in reality, why bother to include it at all? Instead what appears in this case is just kind of editorial shrugging — passing along criticism without any investigation of judgment about whether it is valid.

This isn't a partisan criticism — the Times says that the Rockefeller Foundation "is viewed by some has having a liberal bent." Never mind the typo — it should be "as" rather than "has." There's the passive voice again. It's an alarm bell. Who is doing the viewing? Who are these "some"? Are they fascists, or the John Birch Society? Or are they reasonable measurers? The Times doesn't say. The same points apply as above: If the foundation really is liberal, the Times shouldn't be afraid to describe it as such in its own voice, or to name the people describing it as such, or to hyperlink to them. If it's not really a liberal foundation, why bother to include the description at all? To a reader, it seems like the Times can't be bothered to get to the truth of the matter but is just passing along anonymous opinions.

Smartertimes.com and its editor are viewed by some as having a conservative bent, but we happen to think that even executives of liberal foundations such as Ms. Rodin deserve to be treated with integrity and fairness by journalists. In this case, the Times didn't measure up, and failed both Ms. Rodin and its readers.

New York Times columnist David Brooks writes:

Donald Trump doesn't think in that way, either. He is anti-system. As my "PBS NewsHour" colleague Mark Shields points out, he has no experience being accountable to anybody, to a board of directors or an owner.

To say that Mr. Trump "has no experience being accountable to anybody" is a falsehood so blatant that if Mr. Trump himself had uttered it the Times itself would probably have inserted the words "falsely," as it has taken to doing in an unusually aggressive attempt to fact-check the president-elect.

As a television personality, Mr. Trump has had to be accountable to network executives; if his show did not get ratings, it would be canceled.

As a builder and landlord, Mr. Trump had to be accountable to customers. If tenants don't like the place, they move out, or don't pay rent. If prospective buyers don't like the place, they don't buy the condo.

As a borrower, Mr. Trump has had to be accountable to his lenders. If Mr. Trump doesn't make his debt payments on time, the lenders can seize collateral.

Capitalism has all sorts of built-in accountability mechanisms.

Contrast that to the accountability, or lack of it, faced by journalists like PBS NewsHour's Mark Shields. If his show doesn't get ratings, it doesn't get canceled, because it is public television, subsidized in part by taxpayer dollars. If Republicans in Congress try to cut back the subsidies because cable and Netflix and Amazon have made the need to subsidize television obsolete, the Democrats and their allies in the press cry "Sesame Street" and "First Amendment." If the show doesn't get ratings, Shields can blame the other journalists, or the show's anchor. For that matter, if Mr. Brooks makes or passes along false claims like this one about Trump's lack of accountability, what's his accountability? Does he risk having his pay cut, or losing his job? Or does saying negative things about Donald Trump, even if those things are false, actually help him commercially in the anti-Trump market of Times readers, pushing his column higher on the most-emailed list?

"Blame the New York Times for the Disgraceful Anti-Israel U.N. Security Council Vote" is the headline over my latest piece for the Algemeiner. You can check it out by clicking here.

A Times business section story about what prosecutors allege was fraud at a New York-based hedge fund, Platinum Partners, reports, "Located a few blocks from Central Park, Platinum, founded in 2003, made a splash early on with some of its investments."

Central Park is a big place. The Times formulation "located a few blocks from Central Park" is maddeningly imprecise. As writing, it fails to convey much useful information about this business. Was the office of the business located in Harlem? On the Upper East Side? On the Upper West Side? If the Times is going to bother to tell us where the hedge fund was situated, it would be more helpful to readers if it actually told us where the office was, rather than give vague indications about how far it is from a large park.

The lead article in this week's Times food section is by Julia Moskin and reports on adjustments made by restaurants that have stopped tipping and have instead included the full cost of service in the prices listed on the menu. The article includes this paragraph:

Instead of expecting customers to tip the people who wait on them, tip-free restaurants pay all employees wages that reflect their skill and seniority. The customer pays a fixed amount, stated in writing (in menu prices), as in virtually every other kind of consumer business, from Nordstrom to Netflix to The New York Times.

It stopped me in my tracks, because, as a paying home-delivery subscriber to the New York Times, about every four weeks my newspaper is accompanied by a plea for tips, along with an envelope, from my home-delivery service provider. Does Ms. Moskin subscribe to the Times? Does her editor? Do they tip the person who delivers the newspaper to them?

I understand that the home delivery service is ostensibly provided by an independent subcontractor, but even so, it seems to me that if the Times is going to use itself as an example of a consumer product delivered at a fixed price, the article should at least accurately reflect the reality on the ground, which is that the people who deliver the paper receive some substantial portion of their income in tips and manage to find ways to convey that expectation to the customers.

From the New York Times op-ed page:

An Op-Ed essay on Tuesday about relief for refugees included the phrase, "In our experience, militant violence is vanishingly rare." Because of a miscommunication, the phrase, which was added by an editor, was published without final approval of the authors.

I actually liked the op-ed piece, which was by the mayors of New York, London, and Paris and which was pro-immigrant. But the worst kind of editing is the kind that inserts factual inaccuracies into an article without the approval of the author, especially when the inaccuracy appears insensitive to terrorist victims. The statistical rarity of the militant violence is little consolation to those killed or maimed by it, or to their friends and family members.