TimesWatch

New York Times reporter Jan Hoffman celebrated explicit online sex education programs, including one run by abortion provider Planned Parenthood, in Saturday’s edition: “Sex Education Gets Directly to Youths, Via Text.” Hoffman found a video made by teens showing a girl being pelted with condoms to be "funny and blunt," and profiled a "vital" Chicago school program called Sex-Ed Loop that…

Is House Speaker John Boehner an anti-Obama racist? Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal all but accuses him in his Tuesday blog from Des Moines, “Nobody Likes to Talk About It, but It’s There.” (The web headline is blunter: “Republican Attacks Have Racist Undertones.”) Actually, Rosenthal is all too happy to talk about racist Republicans if it helps Democrats politically, as he did on…

Some document leaks are more equal than others in New York Times-land, as demonstrated by reporter Leslie Kaufman’s snooty story Monday on the latest installment of Climate-gate, “Police Inquiry Prompts New Speculation on Who Leaked Climate-Change E-Mails.” Unlike the paper’s standard eagerness to splash sensitive diplomatic secrets on the front page during the Wikileaks saga, the Times took…

New York Times reporter Mark Landler, with President Obama in Honolulu, filed “Obama Still Lets Surrogates Take the Lead as Gay Rights Momentum Builds” for Sunday’s paper. Like his colleague Ashley Parker did in her own Sunday Times story, Landler celebrated Obama’s oratory, but right at the beginning of his story, on the president keeping his support for gay marriage at an official arms…

New York Times campaign reporter Ashley Parker, following GOP candidate Mitt Romney around Iowa, nonetheless managed to celebrate Barack Obama’s "eloquent and inspiring rhetoric in the state four years ago" in Sunday’s “Romney Quotes His Favorite Patriotic Songs and Offers Voters an Interpretation.”

Times Watch’s end-of-year awards issue celebrates the best of the worst quotes that appeared in the paper or were uttered by Times reporters and columnists during 2011. The New York Times spent much of the year in pro-Obama defense mode, excoriating the Tea Party and conservative opposition to Obama's agenda. Yet the paper found one movement it could embrace wholeheartedly – the leftist…

The New York Times’s slanted political personality reporter Mark Leibovich returned to the Times pages Thursday after a long book-leave absence to file a campaign trail story from Iowa on GOP candidate Newt Gingrich, aka “Nasty Newt”: “On Trail, Gingrich Strains to Show Nice-Guy Side.”

New York Times political reporter Ashley Parker made Wednesday’s front page with yet another  “Isn’t Romney stiff?”-themed story, “The Retooled, Loose Romney, Guessing Voters’ Age and Ethnicity,” cowritten with Michael Barbaro. The Times has put Romney's mannerisms under the microscope on several occasions. Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic candidate in 2004, was another rich Northern…

New York Times media reporter Jeremy Peters was seeing things in Wednesday’s story on secret, “dog-whistle” religious appeals by GOP candidates past and present: “Appealing to Evangelicals, Hopefuls Pack Religion Into Ads.” “Dog-whistle politics” is a derogatory term, often employed to describe what liberals consider to be coded, subliminal racist messages “pitched” too high for the general…

New York Times environmental reporter Justin Gillis took the left-wing idea of extreme weather equaling harmful global warming to heart in his front-page Christmas Day “news analysis” lamenting the Republican block of measures that would document “climate change” more closely, in “Harsh Political Reality Slows Climate Studies Despite Extreme Year.” But an environmental scientist eviscerated…

An April 20, 2008 New York Times story by David Barstow, “MESSAGE MACHINE: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” won a Pulitzer Prize for the explosive claim that the Pentagon had cultivated “military analysts” in a “trojan horse” campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay. On December 1 of this year, the…

Right from the start of her off-lead story Wednesday, New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer dramatically portrayed GOP conservatives (standing firm against a legislative compromise that would temporarily extend the payroll tax cut instead of a long-term solution) as isolated from mainstream politics. “G.O.P. In House Rejects Stopgap On Payroll Tax.”

New York Times art critic Holland Cotter’s year-i- review piece Sunday opened with an awkward metaphorical shout-out to the lefty park-squatters of Occupy Wall Street and an excoriation of the “noxious” 1 percent: “Complacency Butts Up Against Game Changers”: "...art-worldlings did at least adopt one thing from the Occupy Wall Street movement: a new identifying label for the source of…

Can we declare a moratorium on using the word “enigmatic” to describe North Korea’s totalitarian leadership? The death of the North Korea dictator Kim Jong-il made the late edition of the Monday New York Times. The obituary by veteran foreign policy reporter David Sanger appeared under the rather neutral online headline “A Ruler Who Turned North Korea Into a Nuclear State.”