David Kocieniewski

The New York Times has been going to town on controversies over Mitt Romney’s money, from his personal tax rate to the work of Bain Capital, the private equity firm he co-founded. Thursday’s front page story goes into excruciating detail on what is known about Romney's wealth, under the self-fulfilling headline “Romney Riches Are Being Seen as New Hurdle,” by Nicholas Confessore, David Kocieniewski, and Michael Luo. The story was touted by Charlie Rose on CBS Thursday morning and captured by the MRC's Matthew Balan. But riches were not nearly such a "hurdle" when liberal John Edwards ran for president in 2008.

Tax-cut hostile New York Times reporters Michael Cooper and David Kocieniewski teamed up Thursday in a “news” article that assumed as fact (using a study from a left-of-center “nonpartisan” group) that plans by Republican presidential candidates for reducing tax rates would by design lead to widening deficits and "benefit the wealthiest the most": “Higher Deficits Seen In Romney’s Tax Plan, And His Rivals’, Too.” Yet the Times's own chart shows 80% of filers earning between $20,000 and $30,000 -- hardly "the rich" -- would get a tax cut as well.

(Kocieniewski’s hostility to tax cuts is well documented, while Cooper attacked Obama from the left on March 2, 2011 for signing into law an obscure tax break not even liberal economists have  a problem with.)

New York Times tax reporter David Kocieniewski took advantage of Mitt Romney's admission (blared as Wednesday's lead story, under six bylines) that his personal tax rate is around 15% to fight decades-old tax-cut battles in Wednesday’s "Since 1980s, The Kindest Of Tax Cuts For the Rich." Naturally, he brought up liberals' favorite billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who made waves with an op-ed in the Times calling for higher taxes on "the rich."

It’s not Buffett's first appearance in one of Kocieniewski’s slanted "tax the rich" stories. Kocieniewski also took time to refute the head of the "conservative Tax Foundation" on eliminating the capital gains tax.

Ira Stoll dissected the New York Times’ s latest outburst of “sheer hypocrisy masquerading as journalism,” a Sunday front-page attack on the tax-shelter practices of Ronald Lauder, in a Monday post at the New York Sun website -- “Owners of New York Times Used Tax Loopholes the Paper Scored Ambassador Lauder for Using.”

A decade ago Stoll established Smarter Times, an influential blog of New York Times criticism, before becoming editor of the right-of-center newspaper The New York Sun. The Sun is only an online product now, but Stoll is keeping his hand in Times criticism. In his latest post, Stoll summarized the philanthropic work of Lauder, wealthy heir to the Estee Lauder fortune, then noted how:

New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski reported on the front of Tuesday’s Business section reported on the op-ed by billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s in Monday’s Times which has gone viral in liberal circles. Buffett called for higher taxes on rich people like him in the name of fairness, claiming his 17% effective tax rate was lower than anyone else in his office.

Kocieniewski, who in January 2005 took advantage of a book by moderate Republican governor Christine Whitman of New Jersey to attack "conservative hubris" and the Republican party's "lurch to the right,” used the flawed static analysis employed by liberal economists to prove that higher tax rates would automatically lead to higher tax revenues, as if raising rates would have no effect on how people invest their money.

It's enlightening to see what topics New York Times editors find disturbing and newsworthy and which ones they shrug off or ignore.

New York's new senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, is a Democrat who is nonetheless under strong suspicions at the liberal Times for her support of gun rights and her previous representation of a white conservative district. On Friday's front page, she came under fire via a stash of old ammo in a story by Raymond Hernandez and David Kocieniewski. "As New Lawyer, Senator Defended Big Tobacco." Gillibrand is in trouble for defending Big Tobacco as a lawyer representing Philip Morris back in 1996.

The Philip Morris Company did not like to talk about what went on inside its lab in Cologne, Germany, where researchers secretly conducted experiments exploring the effects of cigarette smoking.

So when the Justice Department tried to get its hands on that research in 1996 to prove that tobacco industry executives had lied about the dangers of smoking, the company moved to fend off the effort with the help of a highly regarded young lawyer named Kirsten Rutnik.

Ms. Rutnik, who now goes by her married name, Gillibrand, threw herself into the work. She traveled to Germany at least twice, interviewing the lab's top scientists, whose research showed a connection between smoking and cancer but was kept far from public view.