TimesWatch

In her Saturday column for the New York Times, Gail Collins, who has made a smug little cottage industry out of her obsession (a few dozen column mentions) with Mitt Romney securing the family dog in a hutch on the roof of his car on a family vacation over 20 years ago, finally, if reluctantly, referenced the fact that Obama ate dog as a boy in Indonesia. Romney's story was much worse, she…

Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times, devoted his latest Sunday Review column on the evil that is the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News: "Murdoch’s Pride Is America’s Poison." (Times Watch has documented the long anti-Fox, anti-Murdoch obsession of both Keller and Howell Raines, another former executive editor, which recently culminated in the paper's heavy front-page…

Linda Greenhouse, former Supreme Court reporter for the Times, got soppy in defense of Arizona's illegal immigrants in "The Lower Floor" her latest biweekly column posted Wednesday evening. Apparently Supreme Court justices were remiss last week when they focused on arguing the law, as opposed to reciting Robert Frost and giving in to sympathetic anecdotes about "the simply humanity" of…

Returning to form, the last two New York Times updates from the Greensboro, N.C. trial of two-time Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, charged with misusing campaign money to cover up an affair, contain zero mentions of Edwards's Democratic affiliation. The word doesn't even appear in either story. On Thursday, Lizette Alvarez covered the testimony from Elizabeth Christina…

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is doing a television tour for his book "End This Depression Now!" Charlie Rose interviewed him twice, once on CBS This Morning Monday, then that night for the full hour of Rose's PBS talk show. Krugman appeared on Bloomberg TV Tuesday debating Ron Paul, and the friendlier confines of MSNBC's Rachel Maddow show that night. Krugman's economic recovery plan…

There's a clear Rupert Murdoch obsession within the headquarters of the New York Times. In anticipation of a report from the British government, the Times in the last week has gone into overdrive with front-page stories attacking the international media mogul and chief executive of News Corporation, which oversees conservative-leaning media organs and is a direct Times competitor in New York…

The April 22 New York Times lead story by investigative reporter David Barstow, using internal company documents to ouline how the retailer Wal-Mart bribed Mexican officials to facilitate their way into the country, had reverberations in the business and political worlds, and also managed to hurt Wal-Mart's stock price, which the paper eagerly noted the next day on the front of the Business…

The New York Times's confessed climate activist (and journalist) Justin Gillis made Tuesday's front page with a 2,500-word story on what he called the last line of defense for climate change skeptics: "Clouds' Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters." Gillis, a true believer, proudly told the Columbia Journalism Review in April that it was a "scandal" the media was failing to…

New York Times campaign reporter Ashley Parker looks back semi-fondly at Mitt Romney's apparently successful run for the Republican nomination in her Sunday "news analysis," "A Romney Rambler Looks Back." The people who said that this race was boring and that it couldn’t possibly compete with the excitement and stature of 2008 may yet be right. But they, too, will be back out on the trail.…

New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel is still searching out electoral problems for Republicans among Hispanics: "Crucial to Romney, Florida’s Latino Voters Are Wary of Him, Too." If Mitt Romney is to overcome his problem with Hispanic voters, he is going to have to start by changing a lot of minds in central Florida. A key battleground in a vital swing state, the region is home to growing…

Under the stewardship of Andrew Rosenthal (infamous for accusing House Speaker John Boehner of racism for asking President Obama to delay a speech to Congress for a day) the New York Times's Sunday Review section is devolving into a hard-left opinion page. Last week's Sunday Review fully fulfilled its lefty promise, aided by Times columnists Nicholas Kristof and Maureen Dowd, who chose the…

The world (well, TimesWatch) was eagerly awaiting Gail Collins's return from vacation to see if the New York Times columnist would continue to obsess over Mitt Romney's dog Seamus, strapped in a crate on the top of a station wagon on a long-ago family vacation, in the aftermath of revelations that Obama ate dog as a child in Indonesia. Not only did Collins shamelessly bring it up again, as…

The presidential campaign has just begun in earnest, but New York Times reporter Michael Barbaro already thinks the Mitt Romney campaign is getting too nasty. Barbaro's previous reporting doesn't betray much concern for Republican electoral prospects, but he was very concerned with the tone of the Romney campaign in Thursday's story. (By contrast, the Times doesn't seem to mind Obama's…

Just as she did on Wednesday, the New York Times's pro-amnesty immigration reporter Julia Preston portrayed Arizona's popular crackdown on illegal immigration (now before the Supreme Court) as controversial in "A Hearing And Rallies Over a Law In Arizona." Thursday's edition also featured an above-the-fold front-page photo of a stoic Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer passing "opponents of her state's…