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Heroin

January 17, 2021 at 9:07 am

The New York Times Sunday Book Review has a positive review of "Drug Use for Grown-Ups," a book by a professor of psychology at Columbia University, Carl Hart. According to the review, Hart's book states, "I am now entering my fifth year as a regular heroin user." From the review:

I met Hart once, in 2016, when I interviewed him for an article I was writing about Adderall. He told me that for a responsible adult, it could make more sense to take a small dose of Adderall than to use caffeine — because Adderall has "less calories." At the time, I was struck by his candor. Now I understand that this is his driving purpose: to demystify drugs, to advocate for the right to "the pursuit of pleasure" enshrined in the Declaration of Independence itself.

I found this paragraph puzzling on two fronts. First, caffeine in the form of, say, black coffee has almost zero calories—an insignificant amount. Second, the quotation marks make it look as if "the pursuit of pleasure" is a quote from the Declaration of Independence. That document uses the words "the pursuit of Happiness."

When Senator Tom Cotton wrote a Times op-ed that said "In fact, the federal government has a constitutional duty to the states to 'protect each of them from domestic violence,'" the Times forced out the editorial page editor and ran an editor's note that said in part, "The essay also includes a reference to a "constitutional duty" that was intended as a paraphrase; it should not have been rendered as a quotation."

If the Times doesn't force out the editor responsible for this book review and append an editor's note about misquoting the Declaration of Independence, people might start to suspect there is one standard for opinion pieces from Republican senators, and a second, different standard for laudatory book reviews about heroin-using Columbia professors.

 

"Upcoming Presidential Election"

January 3, 2021 at 7:46 am

This morning's—the January 3, 2021—print New York Times Sunday Book Review includes a review that begins with this sentence: "Barring some variant of an 'October surprise,' the upcoming presidential election seems unlikely to turn on questions of foreign policy."

"Upcoming presidential election"? Is the Times talking about 2024 already? Or am I caught in a time warp? October 2020 is already behind us.

The online version of the review indicates that it was "published Oct. 6. 2020" and "Updated Dec. 21, 2020." Whoever did the updating must not have been paying too close attention.

The Times editors have the job of running an online operation and simultaneously running a print operation. Sometimes the two get too far out of synch, as seems to have happened here, with the print version of a review appearing nearly three full months later than the online version. That is a long enough lag to make the lead sentence of the review obsolete.

While I can understand how this happened, it is nonetheless a bit jarring. Given all the editors the Times employs, and all the money print subscribers pay, you'd think the paper would be a bit more attentive to smoothing out these issues. That way readers of the print book review can spend more time focusing on the books and ideas, and less time stopped in their tracks trying to understand why the Times is speculating in January about a possible October surprise in an election that happened the previous November.

 

Defining the Price-Earning Ratio

December 27, 2020 at 9:40 am

A front-page New York Times news article about whether the stock market is overvalued includes this passage:

The market appears overheated by another gauge that investors often use to determine how cheap or expensive a stock is: its price relative to the profits it's expected to make. Currently, the so-called price-to-earnings ratio for S&P 500 companies is above 22, and has been for much of the year. The last time the market was consistently above that level was in 2000.

Actually, the price to earnings ratio is not the price relative to "the profits it's expected to make"; it's the price relative to the profits it already made.

Here is the definition from investor.gov, a website maintained by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission: "A company's P/E ratio is a way of gauging whether the stock price is high or low compared to the past or to other companies. The ratio is calculated by dividing the current stock price by the current earnings per share. Earnings per share are calculated by dividing the earnings for the past 12 months by the number of common shares outstanding." Note the reference to "the past 12 months."

This isn't merely a technical mistake; it has implications for the article's warning that the stock market is overvalued. Most people expect the pandemic to subside over the next 12 months as vaccination takes hold. The expectation is that unemployment will decrease and economic growth will increase. All that should, in most cases, improve corporate earnings over the next 12 months relative to the past 12 months. The stock prices reflect that optimism about future earnings growth. There's a somewhat useful discussion of some of this here that gets into the subtleties of Shiller p/e or a "cyclically adjusted p/e."

It's not even accurate that the last time the market was consistently above 22 was in 2000. According to as-reported earnings P/E data from the S&P website, the number was at 23.62 on December 31, 2015 and stayed above 22 all the way through September 30, 2018.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

Mixed Messages on Masks

December 5, 2020 at 10:22 pm

"You don't need to wear a mask when you go for a walk or a jog," writes David Leonhardt in Saturday's New York Times. Leonhardt is kind of a big foot—he won the 2011 Pulitzer prize for commentary, and he is a former Washington bureau chief of the Times. His advice is headlined "Three Steps for Safe Living." He also cites the authority of Donald G. "First Person in the Lead News Article" McNeil Jr., another Times reporter: "Donald, who's famously careful, bikes without a mask." Leonhardt testifies that he himself skips masks sometimes: "I do take occasional unmasked, distant walks with one or two friends. They help keep me sane as we head into a long, very hard winter."

This advice conflicts with what I have been reading elsewhere in the paper. The same Saturday paper that carried Leonhardt's "you don't need to wear a mask when you go for a walk or a jog" advice also carries a news article about the latest guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Reports the Times: "Exercise should be done outdoors, with a mask and social distancing, the agency said." A November 24 Times article reported, "Among public health experts, there is near-unanimous endorsement of universal mask mandates to shield people from the virus and slow the pandemic."

In the state of Massachusetts, for example, Governor Baker imposed a mask order November 6, requiring face coverings in public places including "public streets and ways."

Leonhardt isn't the only Times columnist to flout the CDC guidelines. Farhad Manjoo wrote a column that said, "The C.D.C. says the safest way to spend Thanksgiving is to stay home. ...shouldn't I just go with that advice?... my wife and I decided that we would travel for Thanksgiving."

It makes for a sharp contrast with how the Times has treated President Trump. In a column headlined "What Is It With Trump and Face Masks?" Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, "there's something very wrong with any definition of freedom that includes the right to gratuitously expose other people to the risk of disease and death — which is what refusing to wear a mask in a pandemic amounts to." A Times staff editorial in September said, "Mr. Trump's lack of leadership almost certainly made the nation's suffering greater, its death toll higher and its economic costs more severe in the long term. ... he repeatedly belittled and dismissed mask mandates and other social distancing edicts." A November 14 Times staff editorial said, "If Americans want to get the current surge under control through this long, dark winter, they need to skip indoor gatherings, including for the holidays. They need to avoid nonessential travel. They must wear face masks in all public places. .. It's also clear what state and local leaders need to do: Promote social distancing and mask-wearing, and consider mandating masks in communities where case counts are soaring."

Got that? A Times editorial said Americans "must wear face masks in all public places," and a Times news article reports CDC guidance that "Exercise should be done outdoors, with a mask and social distancing." Yet under the headline "steps for safe living," Leonhardt advises readers "You don't need to wear a mask when you go for a walk or a jog," and reports that he does "take occasional unmasked, distant walks with one or two friends." He doesn't specify whether these walks take place in public parks or on sidewalks or trails that may feature encounters with other pedestrians or hikers who haven't consented to the unmasked presence of Leonhardt and his one or two friends. It's not so much Leonhardt's behavior or McNeil's or Manjoo's that I object to; it's the fact that they are doing it while the newspaper's editorial writers and other news columns and the government are advising the rest of us to do something else. It's a journalistic parallel to California governor Gavin Newsom and San Francisco mayor London Breed showing up at the French Laundry restaurant in Napa while their governments are recommending that people stay home.

 

How To Fix America

December 4, 2020 at 8:20 am

The Times Dealbook section features a special report on "How To Fix America." Explains the Times, "we asked top experts for one idea..." Somewhat jarringly, the second "expert" on the list is Robert F. Smith, chief executive of Vista Equity Partners, who proposes to "persuade" companies to "donate 2 percent of their income to do good." The Times doesn't mention it, but here is a report from last month in the Washington Post:

Smith had a secret: He'd played a role in what federal prosecutors allege was the biggest tax evasion scheme in U.S. history, an effort by his longtime associate, Texas billionaire Robert Brockman, to hide $2 billion from tax authorities in an offshore scheme featuring a computer program called Evidence Eliminator and code names such as "Redfish" and "Snapper."

Smith, whose code name was "Steelhead," according to prosecutors, has admitted to hiding profits in offshore accounts and filing false tax returns for 10 years. He is cooperating with investigators and faces no charges. But his complicity in the alleged tax crimes has stunned the many who had seen a role model in the charismatic 57-year-old entrepreneur, often ranked as the wealthiest Black person in the United States.

These two sides of Smith — the impressive generosity on one and the admitted tax evasion on the other — may be hard to reconcile. But they are inextricable, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post, including charity filings with tax authorities and Justice Department court filings.

The "admitted" hyperlink above goes to a statement of facts signed by Smith as part of a Justice Department non-prosecution agreement and makes for some interesting reading to accompany Smith's New York Times essay about "ending systemic racism" and "ensuring equitable access to healthy food."

 

First Person in the Lead News Article

December 1, 2020 at 8:25 am

The first person makes an unusual and arguably jarring appearance in the top front-page news article of today's print New York Times. In an article about the coronavirus, Donald G. McNeil Jr. writes:

In mid-October, I surprised some New York Times readers by shifting from pessimism to optimism, with the epidemic in the United States most likely ending sooner than I expected. Now that at least two vaccines with efficacy greater than 90 percent have emerged, I am even more hopeful about what 2021 holds.

It's all a bit too meta- for my taste. I'd rather hear about the virus and the vaccines than how the virus and vaccine matches the prior expectations of the Times reporter, or the reporter's vacillation between "pessimism" and "optimism," however those are defined. At least in the front-page news articles. But I am even less hopeful than I was about the possibility of the New York Times adhering to longstanding journalistic conventions.

I guess to some extent it's refreshing that the Times is dropping the pretense of the invisible neutral narrator. But now that this has crept into the virus coverage, one wonders about where the Times will draw the line. Do all reporters get to interview and quote themselves as experts on their beats, or just some of them? Can we expect to see this in sports articles, in political articles, in business articles: "Two weeks ago, the stock market surprised me by doing better than expected. I'm even more bullish about next year." It would be useful to get a public list issued by the Times of which reporters the editors trust enough to get away with this sort of thing, and which they do not.

 

A Pulitzer in "Service Journalism"?

October 30, 2020 at 8:52 am

From a New York Times business section article on journalist Glenn Greenwald's resignation from the Intercept: "At the time of the leaks, Mr. Greenwald worked for the United States edition of The Guardian newspaper, and the aggressive reporting he conducted with two colleagues, Ewen MacAskill and the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, gave The Guardian US the Pulitzer Prize in service journalism in 2014."

The 2014 Pulitzer won by The Guardian US was for public service, not "service journalism," which is a term for how-to articles that help readers do things: "How to be productive while working at home," "How to renovate your kitchen without losing your mind," etc. There is no Pulitzer Prize in "service journalism," unfortunately for the hardy souls who churn out these articles, which do, when well done, provide a service to readers, though less glamorously than the investigative crusades that often win the Pulitzer for public service.

 

The Wine-Affordability Problem, and Socialists For Biden

October 28, 2020 at 9:21 am

Two exhibits in today's installment of "I don't know who these guys think their intended audience is, but I don't think this was written for me":

Exhibit no. 1: The front page of the New York Times food section carries an article headlined "Income Inequality And Great Wines." It complains that "Income Inequality Has Erased Your Chance to Drink the Great Wines." The lead example involves how "back in 1994, a bottle of Comte Georges de Vogüé Musigny 1991, a grand cru, retailed for $80 (the equivalent of $141 in 2020, accounting for inflation). Today, that bottle costs about $800."

"It is impossible for most people to pay for these wines," the Times article complains.

The article does not mention that $800 is less than the price of a seven-day home delivery subscription to the Times, which is now $20 a week, or $1,050 a year. Nor does it consider the possibility that a group of people might chip in and share an expensive bottle.

Toward the end, the article concedes, "I am admittedly simplifying a complex issue." It also concedes, "Diminishing access to great wines is certainly not a catastrophe."

Anyway, the whole thing seems slightly off. Whatever has caused the prices of these wines to increase faster than inflation, it isn't "income inequality." It's growth and global trade, which has expanded demand for these wines so that people in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi can buy and drink them.

I don't want to sound too dismissive—$800 is a significant sum, more than I have ever paid for a bottle of wine, and enough to make someone a sustaining subscriber of Smartertimes.com. But the Times routinely covers other even more expensive things—furniture, apartments, apparel, art, college educations—without dwelling on how readers' chance of obtaining them has been "erased."

Exhibit no. 2: The top opinion piece in the print Times is headlined "Why Socialists Should Vote for Biden." It's not a pro-Trump piece explaining that Biden is really pushing a socialist agenda. No, it's an earnest complaint that telling socialists it is okay to sit this one out "has a whiff of bourgeois liberalism to it"—as if that is a bad thing! And as if, in the closing days of the election, socialist New York Times readers are the key swing decisionmaking audience that needs addressing.

Anyway, maybe some significant portion of New York Times readers are socialists sulking about their inability to afford that French wine. That may even be the Times target audience, socialists embittered by not being able to afford the fancy French wine they desperately yearn to drink. For those who do not belong to that demographic, though, reading the paper these days can feel like listening in on someone else's conversation that you weren't meant to hear.

 

Angela Davis and Anna Wintour

October 25, 2020 at 4:26 pm

More and more, the Times is so "woke" as to be almost unreadable.

The Sunday "T" magazine carries an adoring profile of Angela Davis, labeled under the category "The Greats."

Among the highlights, or lowlights, depending on how you see it:

In 2018, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama invited her to receive an award, which was rescinded three months later after unnamed members of the community complained to the board about her support for Palestinian rights and a boycott of Israel. (The institute eventually reversed its decision and issued Davis a public apology.)

Then:

Throughout the '70s and '80s, as the Communist Party U.S.A.'s presence dwindled, and Communist regimes worldwide became increasingly totalitarian, Davis remained a staunch supporter of the party's ideas, twice running as its candidate for vice president in the '80s. In 1991, she stepped away, along with a number of other members, because the party refused to engage in processes of democratization...

That's actually funny, as if the Soviet Union was "increasingly totalitarian" in the 70s and 80s as opposed to, say, in the Stalin era. Or as if what happened in 1991 was really about "democratization" rather than the collapse of the Soviet Union that had been bankrolling and giving orders to the Communist Party USA all along.

Then there's this paragraph, which mixes Davis's voice with the voice of the Times profile-writer:

There's a tendency to define racial progress in America by the upward mobility of various "minority groups" — to count and celebrate how many members have entered the middle class, have graduated from college or have multimillion-dollar deals with streaming services. Davis, however, finds those signifiers meaningless. Racism, she believes, will continue to exist as long as capitalism remains our secular religion. "The elephant in the room is always capitalism," she says. "Even when we fail to have an explicit conversation about capitalism, it is the driving force of so much when we talk about racism. Capitalism has always been racial capitalism." Davis cites the Covid-19 pandemic as "a crisis of global capitalism," adding that "we do need free health care. We do need free education. Why is it that people pay fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year to study in a university? Housing: That's something sort of just basic. At a time when we need access to these services more than ever before, the wealth of the world has shifted into the hands of a very small number of people." She believes we need to imagine a "future that will allow us to begin to move beyond capitalism" but refuses to endorse any existing government as a model for the kind of America she envisions. It may be easy to be cynical about Communism and claim that America won the Cold War, but it's also impossible to deny that this country's financial system breeds income inequality, homelessness and divides us into warring camps separated by class, sex and race.

While the Times profile-writer may regard this as "impossible to deny," it is in fact quite possible to deny it. Watch me. I deny it. Capitalism does not divide us "into warring camps separated by...sex and race." These camps war regardless of whether a country is capitalist or communist. Communist China imposed a one-child policy the effect of which was to create, as the Times itself reported, "a sex ratio so skewed that there is now a bubble of 25 million extra males of marrying age... A cultural preference for boys as family heirs meant that many parents tried to avoid having a daughter through selective abortion, adoption, even infanticide." Nor are non-capitalist societies free of ethnic or racial divisions. For example, the Soviet Union's treatment of the Crimean Tatars and of its Jewish minority was disgraceful.

The fawning profile of Davis and her communist views is surrounded by paid ads for Chanel, Hermes, and other luxury brands, who are apparently so thoroughly capitalist that they are happily funding the "T" magazine attempt to divide us into warring camps.

Meanwhile, the Times business section is devoted to a lengthy attack on Vogue editor, Condé Nast executive, and prominent Democratic political fundraiser Anna Wintour.

Under Ms. Wintour, 18 people said, Vogue welcomed a certain type of employee — someone who is thin and white, typically from a wealthy family and educated at elite schools. Of the 18, 11 people said that, in their view, Ms. Wintour should no longer be in charge of Vogue and should give up her post as Condé Nast's editorial leader.

"Fashion is bitchy," one former Black staff member said. "It's hard. This is the way it's supposed to be. But at Vogue, when we'd evaluate a shoot or a look, we'd say 'That's Vogue,' or, 'That's not Vogue,' and what that really meant was 'thin, rich and white.' How do you work in that environment?"

The Times doesn't say who these 18 people are or who the 11 of them are, or why they are or aren't representative of the hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of employees at Condé Nast or Vogue. The Times business section doesn't even consider the idea that editorial executives should be chosen by a publication's owners on the basis of pleasing customers, not serve at the pleasure of a random group of anonymous former employees, selected by a competing news organization. As for the "thin" criticism, the Times doesn't explain why Wintour alone should be singled out from an entire fashion news industry—including the New York Times Magazine—that for decades hasn't exactly rushed to publish photographs of overweight or obese fashion models.

At a certain point one puts down the newspaper thinking, "I don't know who these guys think their intended audience is, but I don't think this was written for me."

 

Op-Ed Whitewashes China

October 24, 2020 at 10:44 pm

A New York Times op-ed by Stephen Wertheim, "deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University," includes this passage:

Citing China's "bankrupt totalitarian ideology," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo heralds a new dawn for U.S. leadership. "Securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party," he said in July, "is the mission of our time."

Is it? China is authoritarian and on the rise. But it is hardly Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. China is open for business, whether on fair terms or not; the world's largest trading nation makes a strange candidate for a totalitarian menace whose every activity closes off the earth. And unlike 20th-century rivals, China has long abstained from armed conquest. Though it threatens Taiwan, no one thinks it is about to invade U.S. allies like South Korea or Japan.

I don't find the second paragraph particularly convincing.

Nazi Germany was "open for business," too. As Joseph Kahn reported in the Times news columns back in 2000: "At least 50 American companies operated factories in Germany during the years that the Nazis were in power, which began in 1933. American companies continued doing business in Germany after war broke out in 1939. Some remained there until late 1941, when the United States entered the war....Ford, General Motors, Exxon-Mobil and Kodak are among a growing number of American multinationals that say they have found evidence that their subsidiaries used forced labor during those years." A Times book review in 2001 reported that under Thomas Watson, "I.B.M.'s world headquarters in New York conducted business with Nazi Germany from 1933 up to the American entry into the war, and that Watson, a rapacious profit-seeker, even received a medal in 1937 from Hitler for his friendship with the Third Reich -- which he later had to renounce amid considerable embarrassment. By the time war erupted in 1939, I.B.M. technology -- primarily punch cards and the Hollerith machines that tabulated them -- was widely in use by the Germans in the military, the SS, the railways and other key institutions."

The Soviet Union was also "open for business." The New York Times obituary of David Koch reported that his father, Fred, "made millions in the 1920s and '30s by inventing a process to extract more gasoline from crude oil and by building refineries in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and elsewhere." The New York Times obituary of the American businessman Armand Hammer reported that "he profited spectacularly from his dealings with the Soviet Union." Another American businessman, Donald Kendall, sold Pepsi cola in the Soviet Union.

The op-ed's claim that China is different from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union because China is open to international trade just isn't supported by the facts.

The claim that "China has long abstained from armed conquest" is also false. The New York Times reported in 1987, "China invaded Tibet in 1950 and effectively took control of the region in October of that year. ... A Chinese military headquarters was established in Tibet in 1952. In 1959, an incipient armed independence movement was crushed by Chinese forces, which imposed military rule. Over the next two decades, virtually every temple and monastery in Tibet was destroyed by the Chinese, and thousands of Tibetan monks were imprisoned." Chinese military domination of Tibet continues to this day and has been more recently extended to Hong Kong.

This is the second New York Times op-ed this month to airbrush Chinese Communism. An October 1 op-ed by Regina Ip argued "Foreign governments should not benchmark what happens in Hong Kong against standards that prevail in Western countries; those are governed by a political system entirely different from China's. Instead, they should benchmark Hong Kong against the rest of China." Ip wrote of the Hong Kong protesters, "The West tends to glorify these people as defenders of Hong Kong's freedoms, but they have done great harm to the city by going against its constitutional order and stirring up chaos and disaffection toward our motherland."

 

Fact-Checking a Trump Vaccine Campaign Ad Fact-Check

October 20, 2020 at 8:03 am

A New York Times "fact check" of a Trump campaign commercial faults the ad: "Later, the ad says Mr. Trump is 'developing a vaccine in record time.' While potential vaccines may arrive in record time, they are being developed by private companies, not by Mr. Trump or his administration."

Who will fact check the fact-checkers?

Here is the New York Times's Science section's own "vaccine tracker."

Pfizer: "The Trump administration awarded a $1.9 billion contract in July for 100 million doses to be delivered by December and the option to acquire 500 million more doses."

Moderna: "In January, they began developing a vaccine for the coronavirus and since then the government has bankrolled Moderna's efforts, providing nearly $1 billion in support. In partnership with National Institutes of Health, they found that the vaccine protects monkeys from the coronavirus. ... On Aug. 11, the government awarded the company an additional $1.5 billion in exchange for 100 million doses if the vaccine proves safe and effective."

Johnson and Johnson: "In August, the federal government agreed to pay $1 billion for 100 million doses if the vaccine is approved."

Novovax: "In July the U.S. government awarded $1.6 billion to support the vaccine's clinical trials and manufacturing." A July Times news article on Novovax reported: "The company's effort paid off last week when Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's effort to hurry coronavirus vaccines to the market, gave Novavax $1.6 billion, the largest award to date."

I guess it's nice, for a change, to see the Times insisting on giving "private companies" rather than the government credit for anything. But if these vaccines fail, or have negative side effects, the Times will almost certainly find a way to blame the Trump administration rather than the private companies.

Anyway, who should Times readers believe about the role of the Trump administration in the vaccine race? The Science section and business reporters who cover the drug companies? Or the politics reporters who write the campaign ad "fact check" feature? Allowing these features to stand uncorrected and in conflict further erodes the newspaper's credibility. It seems to me to be a case where the "fact-check" confuses voters or carries water for the Biden campaign rather than adding useful information.

 

Drugs and Double Standards

October 4, 2020 at 11:02 pm

The double standards of the New York Times are on clear display in the newspaper's coverage of illegal drugs.

Sunday's New York Times style section carries a mostly laudatory feature about parents turning to drugs during the pandemic: "Though there aren't reliable statistics that break down parents' use of alcohol, marijuana and anti-anxiety medications specifically, overall adult use of these substances has gone up since the pandemic began, said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse."

The Times doesn't really distinguish between "anti-anxiety medications" that are doctor-prescribed and FDA-approved, and marijuana, which has no FDA approval as an anti-anxiety medication. When President Trump suggests that people use hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19, the Times goes crazy about how unscientific he supposedly is. But with marijuana for parents, the fervor that the Times usually brings to its support for FDA approval and large, randomly controlled trials suddenly falls by the wayside. It suggests that what the Times really cares about isn't science but something else.

Likewise, a book review complains:

Feuer tells a brisk, compact tale, but he could have used a few pages more to take us to the other side of the wall of mirrors. He could have told, for example, how in the late 1970s, under intense pressure from the United States, the Mexican Army launched Operación Cóndor in the thickly forested Sinaloa mountains, where many of today's most important traffickers were born. The brutality was overwhelming to impoverished peasants who had found a way out of raw hunger and into peaceful poverty by cultivating marijuana and poppy.

The Times review glorifies these "peaceful" peasant poppy farmers, but the end result was opiate addicts in U.S. cities and towns. The Times has elsewhere been campaigning against the Sackler family for its supposed role in the opioid epidemic. Passages like that one, though, suggest that what the Times is really against isn't drug abuse but billionaires, or philanthropic Jewish billionaires.

 

Love and the Lockdown

October 4, 2020 at 10:15 pm

The Sunday Times Real Estate section, under the headline "Love and the Lockdown," devotes a page to stories of couples deciding to move in together during the pandemic. The article mentions, and includes photographs of, six different couples, all six of whom appear to be white and heterosexual. If a Republican campaign rally or political convention or corporate board looked like this, the Times would be all over it for the lack of diversity.

 

Racist

September 29, 2020 at 9:00 am

The latest example of how the New York Times is throwing traditional journalistic objectivity overboard in its effort to defeat President Trump comes toward the end of a long investigative article (the second in a series) about the president's tax returns. The Times writes, "After he announced his candidacy in 2015 with racist comments about Mexicans, NBC, which carried 'The Apprentice,' cut ties with him and he sold his interest in the Miss Universe pageant, another reliable moneymaker."

Here is the actual relevant passage from a transcript of the announcement speech, from the Washington Post: "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

You can call that anti-immigrant, or anti-Mexican (though Trump does allow that there are good Mexicans). But to call it "racist" seems to me to be overstating it, at least for a news article that is supposed to not take sides. Hispanics, according to the census bureau's definition, can be of any race. Mexicans are not a race. And Trump's statement distinguishes among Mexicans. Is this the most high-minded way to begin a presidential campaign? No. Does it demonize and scapegoat Mexican immigrants? Yes. Does it play on racist fears about people of color as rapists? Yes.

When the Times describes this sort of rhetoric as "racially charged" or "racially divisive" rather than simply "racist," the left accuses the paper of pulling punches or using euphemisms, of being afraid to call out Trump's racism. The Times appears to have taken that criticism to heart and started openly describing Trump's remarks as racist—just as voting in the 2020 election has begun. What a coincidence.

 

Times News Columns Join Anti-Trump Resistance

September 26, 2020 at 10:50 pm

The approaching election seems to be tempting the New York Times into partisanship.

Here are three recent examples where the Times seems to have stopped even attempting to appear neutral.

Example No. 1. A Times news article headlined "Justice Dept. Aids Trump's False Narrative on Voting." This almost comically tilted article begins:

In the effort led by President Trump to create a misleading impression of widespread voter fraud, administration and campaign officials have seized on nine mail-in military ballots in a Pennsylvania county that Mr. Trump won by 20 points in 2016.

Federal officials have disclosed that they are investigating whether local elections officials improperly discarded the ballots, at least seven of which were cast for Mr. Trump, they said.

Trump's margin of victory in the county in 2016 is irrelevant. Pennsylvania's electoral votes are allocated on a statewide basis, and the state result is expected to be close. Even in states that aren't expected to be close, throwing nine ballots—or any ballots—in the trash is news. If it were Republican election officials throwing Biden ballots from a minority neighborhood into the trash, you can bet the Times wouldn't be reporting it as "In the effort led by Joe Biden to create a misleading impression of widespread voter suppression, Democrats have seized on nine ballots in a county that Democrats won by 20 points in 2016." For a more neutral, more appropriate headline, check out the way ABC News did it: "Temporary contractor threw Trump mail-in ballots in trash, Pennsylvania county officials say." In other words, just report the news without all the spin or worrying about what impression it might create.

Example No. 2: A Times news article reports: "The president and his Republican allies have tried to cast the Clinton Foundation, a philanthropic organization, as corrupt, accusing Mrs. Clinton of taking steps as secretary of state to support the interests of foundation donors.... The allegations against Mrs. Clinton were advanced in the book 'Clinton Cash,' by Peter Schweizer, a senior editor at large at Breitbart News, the right-wing outlet once controlled by Mr. Trump's former top aide Stephen K. Bannon. The book contained multiple errors, and the foundation has dismissed its allegations."

The Times depicts this as a theory pushed only by "the president and his Republican allies," and is dismissive of Schweizer. Yet the Times itself editorialized in 2015 on the need for the Clinton Foundation to clean up its act: "Donors have included the United Arab Emirates, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Oman and a Canadian government agency reported to be involved in promoting the Keystone XL pipeline. ... it does make it important that Mrs. Clinton, in defending the family's efforts on behalf of the world's needy, reassure the public that the foundation will not become a vehicle for insiders' favoritism, should she run for and win the White House." And a 2015 New York Times page one news article headlined "Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal" reported, "As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One's chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors."

That article went on:

Some of the connections between Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation were unearthed by Peter Schweizer, a former fellow at the right-leaning Hoover Institution and author of the forthcoming book "Clinton Cash." Mr. Schweizer provided a preview of material in the book to The Times, which scrutinized his information and built upon it with its own reporting.

Whether the donations played any role in the approval of the uranium deal is unknown. But the episode underscores the special ethical challenges presented by the Clinton Foundation, headed by a former president who relied heavily on foreign cash to accumulate $250 million in assets even as his wife helped steer American foreign policy as secretary of state, presiding over decisions with the potential to benefit the foundation's donors.

For the Times to now claim this was all just a project of "The president and his Republican allies" is nonsense. Back in 2015, the Times took the criticism seriously rather than dismissing it as a partisan smear.

Example No. 3: A Times news article headlined "Republicans' Inquiry Finds No Wrongdoing By Biden in Ukraine." The Times article assured readers, "the result delivered on Wednesday appeared to be little more than a rehashing six weeks before Election Day of unproven allegations that echo an active Russian disinformation campaign and have been pushed by Mr. Trump." Compare that to how the Federalist handled the same story: "Hunter Biden Took $3.5 Million From Ex-Moscow Mayor's Wife." Or the Wall Street Journal editorial "Hunter Biden's Business": "The report makes clear Hunter was profiting off his father's position—in Ukraine, and notably in China. Foreigners knew they were buying influence by association.... Committee documents show Hunter's businesses received millions of dollars from other deals with foreigners during the Obama years. This included a $3.5 million wire transfer in 2014 from Elena Baturina, the widow of the former mayor of Moscow."

Again, imagine if House Democrats put out a report disclosing Trump's children accepting millions from Russians or Chinese. (This is a hypothetical; there are no such payments that I am aware of.) The Times would be all over it, not headlining it "no wrongdoing."

As recently as November 2019, Times executive editor Dean Baquet was publicly professing, "We're not supposed to be leaders of the resistance to Donald Trump." Someone should let the rest of the Times newsroom know.

 

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