TimesWatch

Diversity, New York Times style. “Bipolar America,” the cover feature for the Sunday New York Times Book Review, compiles reviews of three new books on Tea Party-related politics, one reviewed by veteran liberal journalist Michael Kinsley, two others judged by Timothy Noah, veteran liberal journalist for The New Republic. Noah says Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of the strongly titled Rule and…

The New York Times Sunday Magazine cover features a profile by Charles McGrath of actor-comedian Stephen Colbert, host of the satirical news show The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, in which Colbert plays a caricature of a conservative political personality. Once you get past the slightly disturbing cover photo of Colbert in a fat suit as some Daddy Warbucks-type, “Stephen Colbert Wants…

New York Times political profile writer Mark Leibovich, in Manchester, N.H. on Saturday, filed “The Santorum of 2012 Comes From a Long History of Political Brawling.” Times Watch sees a clear preference for Democrats and hostility toward Republican subjects in Leibovich’s writing, and this profile of GOP candidate and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum is certainly not a game-changer in…

On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, New York Times political reporters Jeff Zeleny (pictured) and Jim Rutenberg loaded up on crude anti-business stereotypes that went beyond even what front-runner Mitt Romney's GOP rivals were saying, in Tuesday’s “On Primary Eve, Rivals Try to Put Romney on Defensive.” (This version is lightly updated from the print version in Tuesday’s newspaper.)

 “A Dog’s Right To Life?”, Ariel Kaminer’s “Ethicist” column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, approvingly cited controversial Princeton University bio-ethics philosopher and animal rights “ethicist” Peter Singer, who has been protested by advocates for the disabled for radical statements. In an excerpt of his 1993 book Practical Ethics, Singer concluded: “Killing a disabled infant is not…

The presence of conservative Christians sends New York Times political reporters into labeling overload, and that’s where Erik Eckholm could be found Saturday, “Evangelicals Step Up Efforts to United on an Alternative to Romney.” Eleven conservative labels were crammed into Eckholm’s 1,100-word story, not including three more in the photo captions and one in quoted material, and a “religious…

As part of a team of New York Times reporters fact-checking the presidential debate that took place Sunday morning in Concord, N.H., White House reporter Jackie Calmes once again baselessly claimed that expensive Obama-care is actually a money-saver, claiming GOP candidate Mitt Romney was false to assert otherwise. But the history of government cost projections (Medicare, anyone?) strongly…

New York Times Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal, perhaps prodded by criticism from Bernard Goldberg on The O’Reilly Factor Thursday night, posted an update Friday afternoon to his Tuesday blog post offensively accusing House Speaker John Boehner of racism for asking Obama to delay for one night an address to Congress last September. Unrepentant, Rosenthal berated some of his critics for…

Reporter Shaila Dewan saw a “head of steam,” enough “to cheer President Obama as he enters an election year,” in Labor Department figures released Friday morning showing the U.S. unemployment rate fell from 8.7% to 8.5%: “Economy Gains Steam as 200,000 New Jobs Added.” Does this mean Dewan will no longer ask, as she did in a 2009 story, "Weren't we working too much, anyway?"

Friday’s New York Times front-page “Political Memo” by Helene Cooper gave good marks to the president’s new aggressive campaign to demonize Congressional Republicans in the 2012 election year: “Obama Tactic: Jab Congress To Hurt Rivals – An Aggressive Effort to Steal Into Limelight.”

New York Times reporter Nicholas Kulish filed a light story from Berlin Friday on tributes to Knut, the cute, internationally famous polar bear who died last year: “In Death as in Life, Knut the Polar Bear Demands Attention.” But Kulish also included some of Al Gore’s guff about global warming driving polar bears into extinction that made good picturesbut were evetually shown to be without…

Talk about the 1% Percent! Even as the New York Times is freezing pensions for foreign citizen employees in overseas bureaus, it granted a $15 million golden parachute to former chief executive Janet Robinson after she abruptly departed the New York Times Co. t the end of 2011. An online open letter to Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. from the local Newspaper Guild dated December 23 has so far…

Thursday’s lead story on the aftermath of the Iowa caucuses, “Romney Showing Financial Muscle For Next Round,” found New York Times reporters Jim Rutenberg (pictured) and Jeff Zeleny a little label-happy in Manchester, New Hampshire, using twelve variations on the “conservative” label in a 1,236-word story. By contrast, back in 2008, the Times’s Michael Powell actually called the liberal Gov…

New York Times poverty beat-writer Jason Deparle, who once described Clinton’s welfare reform proposal as “a bill that begrudges poor infants their Pampers” and predicted it might cause women to “camp out on the streets and beg,” made Thursday’s front page with the claim that America is becoming “less equal...less mobile” with the poor stuck in place, in “Harder for Americans to Rise From…