TimesWatch

On Good Friday, New York Times Rome bureau chief Rachel Donadio emphasized the Pope's "stern Holy Thursday homily" and used a harsh nickname for him in the lead to her Friday story, "Pope Rebukes Priests Who Advocate Ordaining Women and Ending Celibacy," and threw in extraneous unflattering details about "a Vatican hierarchy in disarray."

Sorry, Masters golf tournament, you may be the most prestigious contest in the sport, but you don't meet the exacting standards of feminist activist/NYT golf writer Karen Crouse: "High-ranking players with daughters are not willing to talk about it. Somebody has to make a stand. Why not me in my own little way?” The New York Times reporter is not done with her crusade against Augusta National…

No "embarrassment" here. Former New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse, last spotted (before the Supreme Court's arguments on Obama-care) calling skeptics of the law's constitutionality "simply wrong," was defiant in her online column Wednesday, even after the administration's case fell embarrassingly flat. In "'Embarrass the Future?'"(the headline is a quote from Chief Justice…

Wishful thinking on behalf of Obama? New York Times White House reporter Jackie Calmes fancies that criticizing the Supreme Court might be a winning issue for Democrats for a change, in Thursday's "Court's Potential to Goad Voters Swings to Democrats." For decades, Republicans have railed every four years against the Supreme Court and its perceived liberal activism to spur conservatives to…

New York Times environmental reporter Justin Gillis's interview with the Columbia Journalism Review put his unapologetic "climate change" activism on display, and compared climate-change skeptics to people who don't believe in evolution. (Environmental scientist Roger Pielke Jr., who nominated Gillis's December 2011 piece accusing Republicans of blocking measures to document "climate change"…

Tuesday's New York Times "Gotham" column by Michael Powell went after conservative guerilla journalism in New York City: "At Advocates' Offices, Confronting an Anti-Liberal Scheme." Powell, a well-known opponent of former New York City Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani as a Metro reporter, portrayed methods that have an honored place in investigative journalism as "dirty tricks" when done by…

On Monday Julia Preston, one of the New York Times's most reliably pro-amnesty reporters, slid into Denver bureau chief Kirk Johnson's usual slot of using a news story to promote a different kind of Western Republican (i.e. not one of those harsh conservatives), in this case Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who is "A Die-Hard Conservative, but Not on Immigrants." He is a Republican and a…

Matt Bai, chief political correspondent for the New York Times Magazine, delivered Sunday a 10,000-word epic cover story on last summer's failed debt negotiations between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner: "Who Killed the Debt Deal?" Bai, who appeared on ABC's This Week on Sunday to say the public was missing "all the good things" Obama-care will do for them, and sees a…

New York Times reporters Reed Abelson and Katie Thomas feared for the consequences of a world without Obama-care on Saturday's front page: "A Health Law At Risk Gives Insurers Pause." The Times quoted nine people, from insurance executives to liberal activists, who suggested that a defeat for Obama-care at the Supreme Court would be harmful for U.S. health care, compared to only one who…

Van Jones, "Lefty Dreamboat"? The New York Times assures us that yes, he is. Jones was the Obama administration's Advisor for Green Jobs until he was booted in September 2009 when his name showed up on a list of people who had signed a 9-11 Truther petition, suggesting he thought there was a Bush administration coverup of what really happened on September 11. In his new book "Rebuild the Dream…

Jackie Calmes, White House reporter for the New York Times, made a surprise appearance in the Friday Weekend Arts pages to talk about cherry blossom season in Washington, D.C.: "A Fleeting Beauty, Shared With the Multitudes." What was unsurprising was Calmes shoehorning in yet another defense of Obama's economic "stimulus" and a chiding of conservative Republican Rep. Eric Cantor. (The article…

The New York Times has previously reported on the dangers of the arcane problem of "epistemic closure," whereby the conservative movement (but evidently not the liberal one) suffers from "a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement....a high-toned abbreviation for ideological intolerance and misinformation." Speaking of which...In Wednesday's edition of the weekly online chat at nytimes.com…

Why is the New York Times so invested in promoting J Street, the minor, left-wing group of Jewish doves, as an influential counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)? Reporter Helene Cooper Wednesday gave the benefit of the doubt to J Street, which wants to, in its words, "end the occupation" of Palestinian land, complains on its website about the influence on…

Support the Second Amendment and gun rights? Gail Collins doesn't want your kind in her town. In her Thursday New York Times column, "More Guns, Fewer Hoodies," the paper's former editorial page editor dropped her trademark (attempts at) humor in her attempt to use the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida to call for severely limiting access to firearms: "Really, just leave us alone. If you don’t…