TimesWatch

The New York Times’s “Caucus” podcast last Friday was focused on the financial crisis. Washington correspondent Binyamin Appelbaum, who focuses on financial issues, joined hosts Sam Roberts and Michael Shear to call for yet more federal spending on infrastructure "investment" in the face of a national debt of $14 trillion.   Binyamin Appelbaum: “....we’re in the middle of this economic…

New York Times’s Public Editor (or ombudsman) Arthur Brisbane weighed in on columnist Joe Nocera, who apologized in print last week for having compared Tea Party members to terrorists in a column August 2. Just four months into his new job as a New York Times Op-Ed columnist, Joe Nocera banged out a blistering screed against Tea Party Republicans who “have waged jihad on the American people…

The New York Times on Friday downplayed results in its own poll that found 44 percent of respondents think the cuts in the debt deal didn't go far enough, versus only 15 percent who said "too far." In an article starting on the front page, writers Michael Cooper and Megan Thee-Brenan didn't mention this fact until the ninth paragraph of page A-14.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on Wednesday  continued to ramp up the newspaper's vitriolic attacks against Tea Party conservatives, bizarrely describing them as "cannibals" "zombies" and "vampires." Connecting the debt ceiling deal to The Exorcist, Halloween and Alien (among other horror movies), Dowd offered these hyperbolic comparisons:

Although it’s Senate Democrats who are refusing to debate and vote on a House plan to fund the Federal Aviation Administration through September 16, the New York Times editorial board today followed the lead of Democrats and MSNBC in slamming Republicans as “hostage” takers. “Republicans, who are experts at such maneuvers, have been holding the reauthorization of the F.A.A. hostage for months…

Leave it to the New York Times to worry about income disparity and gentrification… in Cuba. In his August 3 story “Cubans Set for Big Change: Right to Buy Homes,” correspondent Damien Cave reported on how Cubans will finally be able – albeit doubtless with numerous restrictions – to own their own houses come legislative changes expected to be enacted later this year. “[E]ven with some state…

An arguably unconstitutional effort in San Francisco at regulating the speech of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers was portrayed by New York Times reporter Jesse McKinley as an effort to “stem… misleading advertising”: Seeking to stem what they call misleading advertising, San Francisco officials on Tuesday began a two-pronged attack on ‘crisis pregnancy centers,’ which are billed as…

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera on Tuesday viciously attacked Tea Party Republicans as "terrorists" who wore a "suicide vests" during the debt ceiling debate. Continuing the paper's habit of comparing congressional GOP members to murderers, Nocera derided:

New York Times food writer and junk food sin-tax advocate Mark Bittman took to the August 2 edition of MSNBC’s “Dylan Ratigan” show as part of his promotional tour for “Bad Food? Tax It.” He found a receptive, uncritical audience in the former CNBC business reporter. “It’s like, do you want to use taxes to help people or do you want to use taxes to hurt people? It seems to me right now we’re…

Better late than never, perhaps, but in Sunday’s paper the Times noted that “Lowering Nation’s Credit Rating May Have Little Effect, Economists Suggest.” The article, by Binyamin Appelbaum article, was buried on page A14 (emphasis mine):

In a front-page “news analysis” piece this morning, Times national political correspondent Jeff Zeleny pronounced that “After a Protracted Fight, Both Sides Emerge Bruised.” Yet Zeleny’s analysis was chock full of the typical liberal bias slant that puffs up President Obama, slams the Tea Party as “intractable” and ignores the partisanship of liberal Senate members, particularly Harry Reid (…

"Four years ago, the American auto industry was so opposed to higher fuel economy standards that executives of Detroit camped out in Washington in an unsuccessful bid to undercut them," Bill Vlasic opened his July 28 front page New York Times article. But now "when President Obama announced even stricter standards — in fact, the largest increase in mileage requirements since the government…

Peter Goodman, the former Times left-wing economics writer  who is now business editor at the Huffington Post, called Republicans terrorists in a Monday column. The Observer’s Kat Stoeffel explained: Huffington Post Business Editor Peter Goodman wrote a provocative column today. It was no Esquire “Have More Satisfying Sex Than DSK”, but it did compare Republicans to terrorists. “The same…

Wednesday’s “Lessons From The Malaise” is David Leonhardt’s last economics column before becoming the New York Times's Washington bureau chief. It pretty much encapsulates his liberal worldview, while assuming his premises are universally shared. One of the tricky things about the subject is that almost nothing is certain in the way that, say, two plus two equals four. Economics -- which is…