TimesWatch

Thursday’s New York Times front-page campaign story by Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg prominently featured Obama campaign advisor David Axelrod frankly discussing how the party plans to influence the GOP primary by pitting Newt Gingrich (himself a "juicy target") against Mitt Romney: “Democrats See 2-Horse Race, Adding Whip.” It’s the kind of early White House attacks the Times once disapproved…

New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom, who tracks foundation and charitable giving for the Times, gushed over George Soros in a story Wednesday on the new leader of “his unconventional philanthropic empire”: “Criminal Justice Expert Expected to Lead Soros Foundations.” Through his Open Society Institute, Soros has invested heavily in left-wing groups Moveon.org and the Center for American…

First it was the “99 percent” slogan that captured the imagination of liberals, including New York Times journalists. Now it’s the “Robin Hood tax, which is “beginning to capture the public’s imagination.” The liberal public, at least. Times reporters Steven Greenhouse and Graham Bowley promoted “The Robin Hood Tax -- Support Grows for a Levy on Stock Trades to Help the World’s Poor” on the…

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter may have let his personal views color his enthusiastic reception of the popularity of Occupy Wall Street’s “99 percent” motif, but he was right that it is cropping up in a lot of places these days, especially among liberal activists. It has certainly sunken into the collective consciousness of New York Times journalists. One prominent example: The…

After a stint as a White House reporter for the Times after George W. Bush took office in 2001, Frank Bruni wrote a fairly respectful biography of the president, Ambling Into History. But as a recently minted Times columnist, Bruni has betrayed no similar feeling for the current Republican candidates, who “are to varying degrees yahoos," according to his mocking Sunday Review column "And Now…

Saturday’s lead New York Times story by economics reporter Catherine Rampell found some hope for President Obama: “Jobless Rate Dips To Lowest Level For Last 2 Years – Unemployment at 8.6% – Boost for White House as Economy Shows Some Resilience.” The economic news also led the Washington Post on Saturday, but its deck of headlines was less optimistic than that of the Times, putting the…

The New York Times “Caucus” podcast recorded December 1 featured reporter and podcast host Sam Roberts wondering if it was a potentially dangerous tactic” for GOP candidates to insult the Occupy Wall Street movement. This exchange came a minute and a half from the end, after Roberts asked how the Occupy movement’s “99%” slogan was playing out in the Republican primary.

In Friday’s lead New York Times story, White House correspondent Jackie Calmes again finds the Democrats with political momentum on the policy front, as she has, wrongly, on several occasions in the past, shown by the headline over her optimistic April 2 story, “Jobs Growth Could Stump Obama’s Critics.” (Nope.) This time, it’s Democrats allegedly putting the GOP in a “political bind” over…

New York Times reporter Helene Cooper spread pro-Democratic optimism in Arizona, a state Barack Obama wasn't competitive in in 2008, thanks to the GOP's "hard-line stance" on immigration, in Friday’s “Arizona Sees a Boom In Voting-Age Hispanics – Democrats Sense Opportunity for Obama.”

On Thursday’s front page, New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter produced another homage to Occupy Wall Street, this time their slogan:“Camps Are Cleared, but ‘99 Percent’ Still Occupies the Lexicon.”(Thanks in no small part to fawning reporters like Stelter and others at the Times.) Part of his evidence? Google searches and an opposition blog that had not been updated in two whole weeks.

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…

Kate Zernike, whose reporting on the Tea Party for the New York Times is often hostile, on Wednesday devoted a full story to an outside poll, from the Pew Research Center, claiming falling support for the Tea Party “may be dragging down the Republican Party heading into a presidential election year." (“Support for Tea Party Falls In Strongholds, Polls Show.”) Yet the Times has ignored recent…

Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times, devoted his oversized every-other-Monday column to a snobby and elitist assault on an old foe – the dangers of internet commentary, mostly of the right-wing variety, on the state of economic debate: “The Politics of Economics in the Age of Shouting.” Keller recently took a crash course in economics via airplane and bedside reading…

In Monday's edition of his “Best of the Web” column, under the subhead "Recycling Is Garbage," Opinion Journal’s James Taranto unveiled a humorous pattern of New York Times columnists recycling a satirical headline from The Onion that made an apparently profound point about the unfair burdens accompanying Barack Obama into office: "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job." (Not as hard as coming up…