Clifford Krauss

As the presidential candidacy of Republican Gov. Rick Perry of Texas revs to life, the New York Times is doing its best in both its opinion and news sections to throw sand in the gears.

Times reporter James McKinley Jr. actively led the cheers for Perry’s Democratic opponent during Perry’s 2010 gubernatorial race. This time around, columnist Paul Krugman on Monday tried and failed to knock down Perry’s successful economic record as Texas governor with a misleading column, “The Texas Unmiracle.”

As the old saying goes, a photo can say a thousand things. But what it can't say is how it can be used to say one thing, but really be another thing. And that's just how The New York Times used it.

In the Oct. 9 issue of the Times, an article by Simon Romero and Clifford Krauss examined the events in a decade-and-a-half-long legal battle between a left-wing environmental group, supposedly representing the people of Ecuador, and Chevron over pollution allegedly left behind by Texaco.

However, the Times took liberty with a photo of "murky" polluted water with its Oct. 9 story, one that could lead a reader to Chevron is really at fault for pollution in Ecuador. (h/t Carter Wood, ShopFloor.org) The photograph, taken for the Times by Moises Saman (for photo see here), was captioned "a pool of oil in Lago Agrio, an Ecuadorean town in the Amazon where Texaco left contamination."