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To grasp the underlying anti-Zionist viewpoint prevalent in New York Times coverage of Israel and the Palestinians, one need look no farther than Ethan Bronner's ruminations in the December 16 edition, ("Israelis and Palestinians Ponder Surprising Role for Netanyahu: Peacemaker," page A6. Bronner starts by reporting that Aluf Benn, a senior columnist at the "left-leaning" Haaretz newspaper, recently wrote that he believes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seriously interested in making concessions to the Palestinians to achieve a two-state solution. Bronner then reports that Benn was attacked by many colleagues, politicians and friends who firmly disagreed that Netanyahu could be...

This incredible revelation came to light in a letter Monday from Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thompson to a number of news organizations. It was a response to a NY Times article by David Carr entitled “Under Murdoch, Tilting Rightward at the Journal.” Carr's somewhat snarky article accused the Journal of tainting its reputation as “one of the crown jewels of journalism” into a more mundane conservative newspaper and that it was assuming a pro-business, anti government stance. The Times accusing the Journal of sullying its reputation with biased journalism??? What chutzpah! The Journal’s response was quoted in Editor...

It's a "pretty grim atmosphere" over at the Times today, when layoffs are coming down from on high as the paper tries to reach the 100-person editorial cut it announced earlier this fall. While 74 staff members took the buyout, that left 26 to go. Layoffs have been ongoing all day, sources tell us, with the unlucky few people called upstairs out of the newsroom — where now people are "standing around in clumps and obviously talking about everything." Here's the list of names that we know so far who have gotten the ax, and their departments: Eric Konigsberg —...

A new addition to the New York Times annual Holiday Gift Guide has sparked a minor uproar after a blog devoted to critiquing the paper termed it "racist." Included in this year's guide, which was published in November, is a page titled "Of Color/Stylish Gifts." This first-time feature is described by the paper as "gifts created for and by people of color." After going virtually unnoticed by critics for a month, the guide's been widely slammed in the past week as a collection of "backhanded insults" which are "bordering on offensive" and "out of touch."

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller and Chairman/Publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger are both gearing up to play the Grinch who stole Christmas and lay off a couple dozen staffers. That didn't keep them from stopping by the paper's front-page conference room Tuesday night, where the latest round of downsized journalists had gathered for a final goodbye. Neither addressed the crowd, but instead milled around and made small talk, according to one of the disappeared. The employees, who had accepted buyout packages, left the company by yesterday, many with two years of severance. The two executives will be making hard...

The New York Times '09 Holiday Gift Guide page has some intriguing suggestions. There's the "Holiday Books Guide," the "Personal Tech Holiday Gift Guide," the guide for people of color...Wait. A separate gift page for people of color? Yes. The NYT Picker blog noticed the Times has a special gift section for non-whites: We don't like to throw around words like "racist" in the same sentence as the NYT's name, but there's no other word we can think of to describe this page in the NYT's annual Holiday Gift Guide -- called "Of Color/Stylish Gifts" and aimed exclusively at...

I would like to know is who thought this was a good idea? In this year’s NYT’s Annual Holiday Gift Guide there is a section devoted to “Of Color | Stylish Gifts.” From the intro to the section. Somali fashion, do-it-yourself henna kits, children’s books that draw inspiration from the lives of Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor: it’s not hard to find gifts created for and by people of color this holiday season. Here are some possibilities. I had to read that twice. Because really New York Times? NYTPicker, who was the first to note the addition thinks there’s no...

Stanley Fish in his NY Times blog Opinionator reviews Sarah Palin’s book Going Rogue. It is a very satisfying analysis for those who admire her, of which I am one. But it is totally out of character for the Times. Read it. It finishes with these words: "But run she does (and falls, but so what?), and when it is all over and she has lost the vice presidency and resigned the governorship, she goes on a long run and rehearses in her mind the eventful year she has chronicled. And as she runs, she achieves equilibrium and hope: “We’ve...

Stanley Fish in his NY Times blog Opinionator reviews Sarah Palin’s book Going Rogue. It is a very satisfying analysis for those who admire her, of which I am one. But it is totally out of character for the Times. Read it. It finishes with these words: "But run she does (and falls, but so what?), and when it is all over and she has lost the vice presidency and resigned the governorship, she goes on a long run and rehearses in her mind the eventful year she has chronicled. And as she runs, she achieves equilibrium and hope: 'We’ve...

..You say: “We here at The Times are not scientists. We don’t collect the data or analyze it, and so the best we can do is to give our readers a sense of what the prevailing scientific view is, based on interviews with scientists” and the expertise of reporters like Revkin." Precisely...the NYT picks and chooses what conforms to your opinion. The NYT has been very biased and has not presented over several years the many differing scientific opinions on man-made global warming. Science is not a discipline of consensus. You have primarily emphasized one position and clearly minimized or...

Stanley Fish of the New York Times actually wrote a very very positive review of Sarah Palin’s: Going Rogue An American Life: Sarah Palin is Coming to Town. When I walked into the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan last week, I headed straight for the bright young thing who wore an “Ask Me” button, and asked her to point me to the section of the store where I might find Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life.” She looked at me as if I had requested a copy of “Mein Kampf” signed in blood by the author, and directed me...

going to collapse if we don't pass this Democrat slush fund called the "stimulus bill" tomorrow, the world is going to boil over in 3 months unless we turn our lives upside-down to stop global warming, our "moral standing" in the world is being damaged by Republican strategies in the war on terror, black churches are going to burn because America is a racist country, and millions of Americans are going to go poor and starving unless government does something to regulate those greedy corporate executives. These, according to Frank Rich — who according to his own writings agrees wholeheartedly...

Why did the New York Times scrub out news that it broke about the White House-crashing couple’s ties to an organization that supports Islamic terrorism? Yes, Tareq Salahi, the male half of the couple who crashed the White House State Dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is a Palestinian and likely Muslim. And not only that he’s an activist Palestinian who is likely Muslim, and who is on the board of the Muslim-dominated American Task Force on Palestine...

The New York Times on Friday said it probably will have to lay off newsroom employees, because it doesn't expect to get enough people to volunteer for buyouts. The paper in October announced plans to shed 100 jobs from its 1,250-person newsroom and said it hoped to achieve the reductions entirely through buyouts. Employees were told they had until Dec. 7 to decide whether to take the offer and that the paper would resort to layoffs if too few people volunteered. "We will not know until [Monday] how many Guild and excluded employees have opted to take buyouts, but it...

The “temporary” step down of Phil Jones finally forced the NY Times to do some print coverage of the scandal. Missing from the story are any quotes from the incendiary emails and very little about reaction of other scientists over this growing scandal.... The Times’ emphasis on the criminal aspect of the email release, is more than somewhat laughable in light of some of its rather questionable leaks of highly classified comint information. But the important point here is the Times has simply played the same old game of attempting to suppress a story that has been burning up the...

After its miserable failure to cover the O’Keefe/Giles expose of ACORN, the MSM is striving for a repeat performance in ClimateGate with near silence. This is a story of “hacked” emails from the Hadley Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the UK that were made public about 12 days ago. It is a story of the top climate research scientists cooking the data, queering the peer review process and encouraging each other to destroy data covered by two nations’ Freedom of Information Acts. Coverage by the nation’s two “leading” newspapers has been underwhelming. A total of three print...

Shocking, but true! The ultra-liberal New York Times is concerned about the national debt and deficit spending? I can't believe my eyes! This ranks right up there with Socialist France, formerly Communist Russia, and Communist China warning our government that they're spending too much money. Has the "Old Gray Lady" awakened to the realization that money doesn't grow on trees?

Many conservative sources have been predicting problems for the United States Economy based on the record-setting national debt whose growth has been accelerated during the first year of the Obama Administration. Today in a front page, top of the fold story, the "Bible of Progressiveness," the NY Times has joined the conservatives in predicting severe problems for the US economy based on the fiscal irresponsibility of our government. In this first article of a series, the Times looks at the structure of the debt and how it looms as a danger on the country's horizon. The United States Economy has...

It’s easy to dismiss Sarah Palin. She’s back on the trail, with the tumbling hair and tumbling thoughts. The queen of the scenic strip mall known as Wasilla now reigns over thrilled subjects thronging to a politically strategic swath of American strip malls. The conservative celebrity clearly hasn’t boned up on anything, except her own endless odyssey of self-discovery. And she still has that Yoda-like syntax. “And I think more of a concern has been not within the campaign the mistakes that were made, not being able to react to the circumstances that those mistakes created in a real positive...

The diaries of the journalist who helped expose the Soviet Terror Famine in the Ukraine are now on display in Cambridge. At the time of his writings he was denounced as a liar by Soviet sympathizers including Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Had he not died in suspicious circumstances he would no doubt have been pleased to see that the truth of his accounts is now accepted, although he would perhaps be disappointed to see that one of the outlets for his writing, the Guardian (then the Manchester Guardian), frequently publishes articles explicitly and implicitly supportive of totalitarian...

International travel by world leaders is mainly about making symbolic gestures. Nobody expects President Obama to come back from China with major new agreements, on economic policy or anything else. But let’s hope that when the cameras aren’t rolling Mr. Obama and his hosts engage in some frank talk about currency policy. For the problem of international trade imbalances is about to get substantially worse. And there’s a potentially ugly confrontation looming unless China mends its ways. Some background: Most of the world’s major currencies “float” against one another. That is, their relative values move up or down depending on...

Sept. 1, 1939 Nazis Invade Poland Overcrowding in Germany Cited Sept. 2, 1939 For Nazis, a Hard Time To Be Europeans Neighbors’ Suspicions Caused Stress, Resentment Sept. 3, 1939 In Central Europe, Other Countries Invade Their Neighbors, Too Sept. 4, 1939 When Fuhrers Snap Rallies, Pogroms Took Toll on Leader

Staff Sgt. Gilberto Mota, 35, and his wife, Diana, 30, an Army specialist, had returned to Fort Hood from Iraq last year when he used his gun to kill her, and then took his own life, the authorities say. In July, two members of the First Cavalry Division, also just back from the war with decorations for their service, were at a party when one killed the other. That same month, Staff Sgt. Justin Lee Garza, 28, under stress from two deployments, killed himself in a friend’s apartment outside Fort Hood, four days after he was told no therapists were...

Timothy Dolan came to town with a hammer in his hand. Of course, it wasn’t really much of hammer: just a little tappity-tap kind of thing, a tack hammer with a bright blue head, which he used it to rap on the door of St. Patrick’s Cathedral as part of the traditional ceremony for the installation of a new archbishop in New York. That was back on April 15, the Wednesday before Easter. In the six months since, Archbishop Dolan has done hardly any public hammering — until now. On Oct. 29 he used the archdiocese’s website to publish a...

NY Times: Fort Hood Massacre American's Fault The shootings at Fort Hood , however, pose a different problem for the president, by shining a spotlight on the tensions Muslims feel inside the United States. The score at Ft. Hood so far: Muslims 13, Non-muslims 0.

The historic campus of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., has offered instruction in journalism for well over a century — but probably never quite like this. On Friday, the twice-yearly Washington and Lee Journalism Ethics Institute will hear from its latest keynote speaker: Jayson Blair, the former New York Times reporter who triggered the greatest scandal in the newspaper's history. "Getting Jayson Blair obviously was a departure," says Edward Wasserman, the Knight professor of journalism ethics at Washington and Lee. Indeed. The keynote address is typically reserved for people like Lowell Bergman or Toni Locy, journalists who withstood...

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan has condemned The New York Times -- blasting the Gray Lady and its columnist Maureen Dowd for what he says are examples of unfair, prejudicial and just downright mean anti-Catholicism. Dolan used his blog last Thursday on the Archdiocese of New York's Web site to rail against the Times a day after the paper refused to print his critique as an op-ed piece. He singled out Dowd -- a poison-penned, Pulitzer winner and former Catholic-school girl -- for "the most combustible," "intemperate and scurrilous" "diatribe" she wrote on Oct. 25, which "rightly never would have...

Jayson Blair, who was at the center of a major journalism scandal as a New York Times reporter in 2003, will be the featured speaker at Washington and Lee University’s 48th Journalism Ethics Institute on Friday, Nov. 6. The title of Blair’s talk is “Lessons Learned.” The public is invited to the presentation at 5:30 p.m. in Stackhouse Theater, Elrod Commons. Blair resigned from the Times after an investigation found that he had plagiarized and fabricated major portions of stories that he had written during four years with the Times. Some of the stories that he covered in this manner...

The feeble pulse of moderation in the Republican Party is in danger of flat-lining in the Nov. 3 Congressional election in upstate New York. Luminaries like Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have taken opposing sides over whether the party dare tolerate the official Republican candidate in the 23rd district — Dede Scozzafava, a six-term assemblywoman whose record includes refreshing tinges of centrism. Ms. Scozzafava was nominated by local party leaders as eminently electable despite — or because of — her defense of women’s abortion rights and her tolerant views on same-sex marriage. She is already shunned by many more ideologically...

I STOOD in the bathroom of the Taliban compound and waited for my colleague to appear in the courtyard so we could make our escape. My heart pounded. A three-foot-tall swamp cooler — an antiquated version of an air-conditioner — roared in the yard a few feet in front of me. I feared that the guards who were holding us hostage might wake up and stop us. I feared even more that our captivity would drag on for years.

The New York Times Co. said Thursday that it lost $36 million, or 25 cents a share in the third quarter, compared to a loss of $106 million, or 74 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Earnings per share from continuing operations, excluding severance and special items, were 16 cents. Revenue fell 17% to $571 million from $687 million. Analysts polled by FactSet Research estimated, on average, a loss of 2 cents a share and sales of $576 million.

The New York Times reports today that the paper will cut 8 percent of its newsroom staff, or around 100 people by the end of 2009. Currently, the New York Times employs 1,250 staff members in the news department. The media company is planning to offer buyouts to both union and non-union staff and will need to implement layoffs if they can’t get enough people to participate in the buyout offer.

The New York Times (NYT.N) plans to cut 100 newsroom jobs by the end of the year through buyouts and might resort to layoffs as it reels from the advertising revenue drop that is imperiling U.S. newspapers. The news, delivered in a memo to employees by Times Executive Editor Bill Keller on Monday, comes after the newspaper's workers already took a 5 percent pay cut for most of this year and a similar program last year. "When we took our 5 percent pay cuts, it was in the hope that this would fend off the need for more staff cuts...

Some things to ponder in the wake of today's news that the New York Times Co. won't be selling the Boston Globe after all (Herald story here, Globe story here, entire memo to follow): 1. Given the speed with which the Times Co. decided to reject the bids assembled by Steve Taylor and Platinum, it seems--at least from the outside--like not a lot of deliberation was required. When did the Times Co. make up its mind not to sell? And what was the determing factor? 2. The elimination of lifetime job guarantees earlier this year paved the way for some...

The New York Times can be relied upon to tell us where liberals want to take the country—to tell us what they really want. In an editorial last Thursday, the Times said: “[I]n a rational system of medical care, there would be virtually no restrictions on financing abortions. But abortion is not a rational issue.”Not rational? Medical science has known since 1857 that human life begins at conception. It was the medical profession—not the churches—that vigorously lobbied for protective laws against abortion in the 1850s and 1860s. Those laws upheld the highest form of rationality and morality. Those protective laws...

<p>Those who read the New York Times's coverage of the unsuccessful results of Barack and Michelle Obama's attempt to seal the 2016 Summer Olympics bid for Chicago on Friday afternoon ('For Obama, an Unsuccessful Campaign") might want to read it again.</p>

Clark Hoyt, the NY Times Public Editor, covers its lack of reporting of the O’Keefe/Giles Acorn exposé and blames it on being “slow off the mark.” Hoyt was kept on for a year after his two year term expired earlier this year, no doubt by endearing himself to editorial management with soft criticism. He didn't fail them today. I wrote about Hoyt last year and called him a joke. In the column I pointed out the new bias of the Times is that of burying stories that don’t support the Democrat’s game plan. Read it, it covers some points others...

From: NEWSPAPER GUILD MAILING Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:03:54 -0400 Subject: Guild UNION TIMES: 'Cost-Saving' Committee Meets To: [New York Times guild members] September 24, 2009 "Cost-Saving" Committee Meets Times Agrees to Offer Voluntary Buyouts Pay Cut to be Restored in January Representatives of the Guild and Times management met earlier this week to discuss the possibility of offering a Voluntary Buyout and to identify cost-saving opportunities that still may exist at the newspaper. The meeting was part of a process that was agreed to in discussions between the union and company management last spring regarding the temporary 5...

This would be the perfect time to do one of those "caught red handed" commercials, Obama White House changes their story on New York Governor David Paterson, all in the same day...

I suppose it's only fair. Judging by the Times' plunging stock value and rapidly shrinking readership, fans of conservative talk radio are not fans of the paper. But this is a little over-the-top, even for this discredited fishwrap. Call It Ludacris: The Kinship Between Talk Radio and Rap "Hour after hour, rant after rant, it is a feast of words and feverish emotion, interrupted only by regular commercials and the occasional call from the awe-struck fan. I’d heard these voices before, but only in sound bites. When you don’t own a car and don’t tune in at home, you probably...

Whom do Democrats trust more for news: Fox News or the New York Times? With all the vitriol directed against Fox News, one would think that it is a no brainer. But a new Pew Research Center for the People & the Press poll shows that it is Fox News. While 43 percent of Democrats have a positive view of Fox News, 39 percent of Democrats feel the same way about the New York Times. Of course among Republicans or Independents it isn't even a close contest. 72 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of Fox News compared to...

The news media's credibility is sagging along with its revenue. Nearly two-thirds of Americans think the news stories they read, hear and watch are frequently inaccurate, according to a poll released Sunday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. That marks the highest level of skepticism recorded since 1985, when this study of public perceptions of the media was first done. The poll didn't distinguish between Internet bloggers and reporters employed by newspapers and broadcasters, leaving the definition of "news media" up to each individual who was questioned. The survey polled 1,506 adults on the phone...

Political commentator, author and writer for The Atlantic magazine Andrew M. Sullivan won't have to face charges stemming from a recent pot bust at the Cape Cod National Seashore - but a federal judge isn't happy about it. U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert B. Collings says in his decision that the case is an example of how sometimes "small cases raise issues of fundamental importance in our system of justice." While marijuana possession may have been decriminalized, Sullivan, who owns a home in Provincetown, made the mistake of being caught by a park ranger with a controlled substance on National Park...

A New York Times reporter taken hostage by militants was rescued from a hide-out in northern Afghanistan early Wednesday in a daring raid that left his translator, a British soldier and civilians dead. Journalist Stephen Farrell was kidnapped Saturday while interviewing villagers in the northern province of Kunduz about NATO air strikes that reportedly left as many as 90 people dead. Farrell's interpreter, one of the British commandos sent to rescue them and several others died when a firefight broke out during the raid. According to the Times, Farrell called an editor at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday and declared, "I'm out!...

According to reports from Afghanistan, New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell and his driver/interpreter have been kidnapped while attempting to cover the story of the NATO airstrike on the two Taliban-hijacked tankers in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The local Afghan press is reporting on Farrell's kidnapping; however, the international press and the wires services have been silent on this issue. Multiple sources in Afghanistan tell me that The New York Times is attempting to suppress the reporting on Farrell's kidnapping. Read more: http://www.longwarjournal.org/threat-matrix/2009/09/nyt_reporter_kidnapped_in_kund.php#ixzz0QO1gsSUt

Reporter Jim Rutenberg wrote an unfavorable profile of former NY Lt Governor Betsy McCaughey and her efforts to educate the public about the dangers of Obamacare in today's NY Times: Her work has, however, proved to be a boon to opponents of Mr. Obama’s health care plans, if occasionally judged as over the line even by some of them. She incorrectly stated in July that a Democratic bill in the House would “absolutely require” counseling sessions for Medicare recipients “that will tell them how to end their life sooner,” drawing a “Pants on Fire” rating from the PolitiFact fact-checking Web...

Health care reform may be defeated this year in part because so many Americans believe the government can’t do anything right and fear that a doctor will come to resemble an I.R.S. agent with a scalpel. Yet the part of America’s health care system that consumers like best is the government-run part. Fifty-six to 60 percent of people in government-run Medicare rate it a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale. In contrast, only 40 percent of those enrolled in private insurance rank their plans that high. Multiple surveys back that up. For example, 68 percent of those in Medicare...

REMEMBER “peak oil”? It’s the theory that geological scarcity will at some point make it impossible for global petroleum production to avoid falling, heralding the end of the oil age and, potentially, economic catastrophe. Well, just when we thought that the collapse in oil prices since last summer had put an end to such talk, along comes Fatih Birol, the top economist at the International Energy Agency, to insist that we’ll reach the peak moment in 10 years, a decade sooner than most previous predictions (although a few ardent pessimists believe the moment of no return has already come and...

Atrazine Levels across the Nation

In a Friday story headlined "Britons Fault Health Service, Until Someone Else Does," Times London correspondent Sarah Lyall singled out Republican criticism of British health care, citing tiny protests, larger Twitter campaigns, and exercised editorials in The Economist magazine about "irresponsible distortions" by conservatives in America. While Britons love to complain about waiting lists, disparities in treatment, "infection-breeding hospitals" and "top-heavy bureaucracy," they are seemingly unanimous in opposition to Obama critics: They are furious, for example, that the health service is being held up as an example of the failures of socialized medicine by Americans opposed to President Obama’s health...