TimesWatch

Detroit's former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was convicted Monday on multiple serious charges, including racketeering, fraud, and extortion. But Times reporter Mary Chapman buried Kilpatrick's Democratic party affiliation in paragraph 19 of her 21-paragraph report.

Even then, the Times never even directly labeled Kilpatrick a Democrat:

On the front page of Monday's New York Times, Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak presented readers with the proposition that "Smaller States Find Outsize Clout Growing in Senate." It's part of "Unequal Representation," a Times series "examining challenges to the American promise that all citizens have an equal voice in how they are governed."

But Liptak's analysis of the "disproportionate power enjoyed in the Senate by small states...on issues as varied as gun control, immigration and campaign finance" showed a lot of concern for the specifically liberal policies currently thwarted by the old inconvenient Constitutional arrangement.

New York Times reporters Scott Shane and Michael Shear found "right-wing conspiracy" mongering in the aftermath of the unusual 12-hour filibuster by Republican Sen. Rand Paul protesting the White House's failing to rule out the use of drone strikes on American soil or against U.S. citizens: "Visions of Drones Swarming the Skies Touch Bipartisan Nerve."

That slightly dismissive headline on the front of Saturday's edition ("Visions" assumes an abstract and an unreasonable fear) is matched by the story, which tilts a little to the left in labeling and to the Obama administration in its dismissive tone toward White House critics, pitting "liberal activists" against "right-wing conspiracy theorists" and "self-proclaimed defenders of the Constitution." In contrast, during the Bush years the Times took seriously the most paranoid fears of liberals about the Patriot Act.

The sequestration may have fizzled out as a national crisis, but it's still killing jobs, apparently. Saturday's New York Times lead story by Nelson Schwartz and Binyamin Appelbaum strongly insisted that last Friday's surprisingly good job numbers from the Labor Department are endangered by the 2.4% federal spending cuts known as sequestration, "Jobless Rate Dips to Four-Year Low – 236,000 Jobs Added – Unemployment Level Down to 7.7%, but Analysts Fear U.S. Spending Cuts."

Appelbaum said in an August 2011 Times podcast that "the real problem is that there's this tremendous political pressure to get smaller, and everything we know about economics tells us that they should be doing the opposite, they should be getting bigger right now....it's as cheap as it's ever been to borrow money, invest it in infrastructure, invest it in things that will pay off in the long run, and help out the economy." On Saturday he and Schwartz (who also likes government stimulus) argued:

Republican Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster on Attorney General Eric Holder's refusal to rule out drone strikes against U.S. citizens, which ended early Thursday morning, was absent from the front page of Thursday's New York Times. The Times buried its coverage of Paul's striking "talking" filibuster, in which he held the floor for nearly 13 hours, ostensibly in opposition to Obama's choice of John Brennan for CIA director. Brennan was serving as a proxy for Paul's demand that Holder rule out drone strikes on American citizens or on U.S. soil.

Paul's performance did not merit a full news story in the Times. Coverage was limited to a few paragraphs in the middle of a more comprehensive story by Charlie Savage on bipartisan criticism of Attorney General Eric Holder, and a single sentence deep into Scott Shane's front-page story "C.I.A.'s History Poses Hurdles For a Nominee." Liberal columnist Gail Collins also wrote about it, in snotty fashion. There wasn't even a print-edition photo of the dramatic filibuster.

No good deed goes unpunished? In a compromise move, North Carolina officials will issue drivers licenses to young illegal immigrants who have won deferrals from deportation, but with a distinguishing colored marking on the licenses – a pink stripe. New York Times Atlanta bureau chief Kim Severson likened the stripe to "a modern-day scarlet letter" in "North Carolina to Give Some Immigrants Driver's Licenses, With a Pink Stripe."

Severson insisted in her Wednesday story from Raleigh that "some are calling" it that, though she doesn't quote anyone using that memorable term. (A web search suggests the "some" people calling NC's move "a modern-day scarlet letter" are solely Severson's fellow aggrieved liberal journalists.)

Venezuelan despot Hugo Chavez is dead of cancer at age 58, the end of a bizarre odyssey that took him to Communist Cuba in a failed attempt at a cure. William Neuman's off-lead story in Wednesday's New York Times credited the left-wing dictator for having "changed Venezuela in fundamental ways, empowering and energizing millions of poor people who had felt marginalized and excluded."

The headline called the leftist despot a populist: "Chavez Dies At 58 With Venezuela In Deep Turmoil – Debilitated By Cancer – Crowds Mass in Capital Mourning Populist Who Defied U.S." Thus the paper maintains its double standard on labeling dead dictators, with the paper rarely using the term "dictator" to refer to communists, only fascists.

Are bitter conservatives "clinging" to spending cuts? That's the tone of New York Times political editor Richard Stevenson's front-page "Political Memo" Monday, "G.O.P. Clings to One Thing It Agrees On: Spending Cuts," which contained a whopping 13 "conservative" labels (and a couple of "liberals" as well).

Conservative governors are signing on to provisions of what they once derisively dismissed as Obamacare. Prominent Senate Republicans are taking positions on immigration that would have gotten the party’s presidential candidates hooted off the debate stage during last year’s primaries.

On Sunday, New York Times military affairs reporter James Dao filed from Camp Leatherneck in Afghanistan on the Marine Corps leaving the country, "As Marines Exit Afghan Province, a Feeling That a Campaign Was Worth It."

Yet when a Marine wrote a letter, found after his death, that his Iraq service had been worth it, a 2005 story by Dao clipped the letter to instead emphasize the Marine's doomed sense of foreboding, diminishing his memory in the process.

The perils and victims of the round of the mandatory federal spending cuts known as sequestration led the New York Times' weekend coverage, with the 2.4% cut in annual federal spending that went into effect starting Friday labeled "austerity" and ushered in with headlines warning that "Poor May Be Hit Particularly Hard." Also: those who still approve of Congress tend to be "Obama haters," according to a news story.

Predictably, it was pro-Obama White House reporter Jackie Calmes' lead story in the Sunday edition that forecast the "new round of austerity" and predicted less economic growth as a result: "Cuts To Achieve Goal For Deficit, But Toll Is High – $4 Trillion In 10 Years – No 'Grand Bargain,' and a Drag on Jobs and Economic Growth."

Pope Benedict XVI served his final day as pontiff on Thursday, and the New York Times' Rome bureau chief Rachel Donadio sent him on his way from Vatican City under a dark cloud: "As Pope Departs, Discord Remains at Vatican."

As the sun set on Rome and on his turbulent eight-year papacy, Pope Benedict XVI, a shy theologian who never seemed entirely at home in the limelight, was whisked by helicopter into retirement on Thursday.

But while Benedict, 85, retires to a life of prayer, study, walks in the garden and piano practice, he leaves in his wake a Vatican hierarchy facing scandals and intrigue that are casting a shadow over the cardinals entrusted with electing his successor in a conclave this month.

The New York Times finally noticed what Washington has obsessed over the last few days -- the dust-up between veteran Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward and the Obama White House over an email from a White House aide (apparently Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council) who emailedhis disagreement with Woodward's characterization that the White House had moved the goalposts regarding the sequester: "I think you will regret staking out that claim."

Woodward told CNN's Wolf Blitzer he considered that a veiled threat. Yet his fellow journalists at the Times (as opposed to "conservatives") have now followed most of the mainstream media in taking the side of the government.

In "G.O.P.'s Ideological Split Appears in Virginia Governor's Race," New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel saw a controversial candidate on one side of the Virginia governor's race -- Republican candidate Kenneth Cuccinelli, Virginia's attorney general, who has support in the Tea Party and social conservative wings of the party.

His likely Democratic opponent? Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee and controversial fundraiser for the Clinton administration. But judging by the paper's lack of coverage so far, only Republicans have a problem. Gabriel doesn't even mention Democrat McAuliffe until paragraph 12, and in an odd omission, calls him only "a businessman and former political operative."

Spinning the sequester in the New York Times. After weeks of cringing over the supposedly damaging federal cuts due to take effect tomorrow (even as the public shrugs them off) Jonathan Weisman made an 180-degree turn on the front of Thursday's paper: "Parties Focus On the Positive As Cuts Near." The text box: "An onerous possibility turns out to be not quite so onerous."

Suddenly the Times is seeing a win-win-win situation, for liberals, conservatives, and the White House.

New York Times reporter Kirk Johnson, hypersensitive to conservative defeat and retreat in the Western states, using an upcoming Supreme Court case as an excuse to lead more cheers for gay rights in "deeply conservative" Idaho in Wednesday's "Gay Couples Are Navigating A New Geography of Marriage."

He sympathetically profiled a couple living in Idaho, a state they consider backward: "For them, the battle for rights and recognition is to be waged here at home, in a deeply conservative state where same-sex marriage remains, for now, an unlikely dream."

The front page of Wednesday's New York Times featured another lament for the supposed new "austerity" encompassing the nation, from economics reporter (and enthusiastic Keynesian) Binyamin Appelbaum, "As Budget Cuts Loom, Austerity Has Killed Off Government Jobs." An accompanying graphic with text insisted "Austerity Is Already Here."

Federal government spending often falls after recessions and wars, but the current round of cuts in investment and spending on goods and services is unusually deep. Combined with cuts by state and local governments, the drop in government’s contribution to economic growth is the largest in more than 50 years.

New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss's huge cover story, "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food is a super-sized 9,400 words long, eclisped perhaps only by Matt Bai's slanted magazine cover story on the debt fight in last April. A. Barton Hinkle saved everyone some time with a succinct sarcastic summary column.

A recent cover story in The New York Times Magazine offers a shocking exposé of Big Food. In granular detail it relates the food conglomerates' "hyper-engineered, savagely marketed, addiction-creating battle for 'stomach share.'” If you don't have the time to slog through the nearly 10,000 words, though, here's the big news in this shocking, horrifying, and incredibly alarming story.

The New York Times sent reporters scurrying around the country to deliver Tuesday's dire dose of sequestration fear -- a full page (with photos) of impending cuts to a range of federal programs starting Friday. Lead reporter Michael Cooper set the groaning board:

The owner of a Missouri smokehouse that makes beef jerky is worried about a slowdown in food safety inspections. A Montana school district is drawing up a list of teachers who could face layoffs. Officials at an Arizona border station fear that lines to cross the border could lengthen. And if Olympic National Park in Washington cannot hire enough workers to plow backcountry trails, they may stay closed until the snow melts in July.

Reporting on former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel's nomination to serve Obama as secretary of defense, the New York Times' Jeremy Peters tried to imply as he has before that the Republican move to filibuster Hagel, who bombed in hearings, was both uncollegial and unprecedented.

But Peters had to stretch in his Tuesday piece, limiting his examples to the narrow fact that Hagel is the first secretary of defense nominee to be threatened with a filibuster (ignoring the many other Republican nominees filibustered by Democrats, as well as the Democrats' outright rejection of Republican nominee John Tower in 1989).

New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer missed the point in her Tuesday take on Michelle Obama's "star turn" on Oscar night to announce the award for best picture at the Academy Awards, "A Tale of Secret Talks and Intrigue Behind Michelle Obama's Oscars Appearance."

She may not have walked the red carpet, but Michelle Obama -- all bangs and biceps and bling -- had her own star turn during Sunday night’s Academy Awards ceremony, when she announced the winner for best picture via satellite from the White House.

Times personal finance reporter Tara Siegel Barnard would love the U.S. to embrace Europe's cradle-to-grave safety net mind-set, lumping America with apparently inferior countries like Liberia, Suriname and Papua New Guinea for the sin of not offering paid maternity leave. Barnard made the argument in Saturday's Business section, in her first column since returning from maternity leave, "In Paid Family Leave, U.S. Trails Most of the Globe."

Over the weekend the New York Times painted the $85 billion in budget cuts that will start kicking in Friday – known in Washington-speak as sequestration -- in dramatic terms, falsely heralding a new age of "government austerity" (since when?) and passing along stories of budget-cut fear-mongering from the state level.

Saturday's lead from Michael Cooper painted a White House-friendly horror story: "Fear of U.S. Cuts Grows In States Where Aid Flows – Recovery Seen At Risk – Wide Impact Looms on Jobs, Tax Revenue, and Schools."

In the aftermath of the Oscars, New York Times fashion reporter Eric Wilson bizarrely documented an example of "feminine repression" on the red carpet in Monday's arts section. Almost as silly was a Critics' Notebook from the painfully political movie review duo Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, who delivered the shocking news that Hollywood movies are less than historically reliable, while comparing Obama to President Lincoln.

Worse than a hurricane? New York Times reporter Matthew Wald went a bit overboard in his Friday story on possible delays at airports because of the budget cuts due to take effect next week, known as the sequester: "Spending Cuts Threaten Delays In Air Travel."

Friday's lead editorial encapsulates the liberal mindset that drives the New York Times: "Why Taxes Have to Go Up." And not just on the rich -- the Times argues that the rich must pay more first in order to build "consensus" for raising taxes on the middle class as well. In Times-land, there is no such thing as a spending problem, only a failure to sufficiently raise taxes on everyone.

Friday's lead New York Times story celebrated "G.O.P. Governors Providing a Lift For Health Law." The most notable convert: Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who reversed his position this week and announced his support for expanding Medicaid.

The Times' Abby Goodnough and Robert Pear credited Scott for the embrace of Obama-care (via "proponents" who "say that doing so will not only save lives, but also create jobs and stimulate the economy") and also found a convenient "moral dimension" in the call by Catholic bishops to expand the Medicaid program, a dimension the paper never found when the Church was opposing the Obama-care requirement that religion institutions provide contraception coverage.

The New York Times is engaging in defense of scandal-plagued Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, accused of influence peddling in his suspicious relationship with Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen, who flew Menendez to the Dominican Republic on his private plane. Menendez intervened on Melgen's behalf in two Medicare disputes.

Last Sunday the paper very strangely chided a conservative group, the National Legal and Policy Center, for its part in exposing the Menendez scandal (even though the Times itself collaborated with the group, using its data to write its February 1 front-page story on the Menendez accusations). As if to make up for helping put the story (somewhat) into the mainstream press, the front of Thursday's edition featured a sympathetic profile of Menendez by reporters Raymond Hernandez and Sam Dolnick, "Amid Questions About Ethics, Battle-Tested Senator Digs In." The Times gave more space to supporters who suggest the whole thing is a smear job.

Basking in the campaign-like trappings of Obama's White House press conference, reporter Jackie Calmes repeated in Wednesday's New York Times, the president's horror stories on the purportedly deep impact of mandatory budget cuts, known as the "sequester," that are scheduled to hit March 1: "Obama Tries to Turn Up Pressure on Republicans as Cutbacks Near." The cuts amount to an estimated $85 billion this year out of a $3,600 billion dollar budget, but Calmes pushed the pain of Obama having to deal with recalcitrant Republicans:

"Days away from another fiscal crisis and with Congress on vacation, President Obama began marshaling the powers of the presidency on Tuesday to try to shame Republicans into a compromise that could avoid further self-inflicted job losses and damage to the fragile recovery," she wrote. "But so far, Republicans were declining to engage."

On the front of Saturday's Business section, New York Times economics reporter Annie Lowrey flatteringly quoted unlabeled left-wing French economist Emmanuel Saez, who may be the Times' favorite economist, in yet another hang-wringer on the evils of income inequality and the dreaded 1%: "Incomes Flat In Recovery, But Not For the 1%."

In an October 2012 article Lowrey termed Saez, who favors huge tax hikes on the rich in the name of fighting inequality, a "respected economist." On Saturday she further beefed up Saez's resume to assuage any doubt among her readers, calling him "a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, an economic laurel considered second only to the Nobel."