TimesWatch

Newt Gingrich: He’s No Mario Cuomo "Whatever can Newt Gingrich be thinking? That’s the question a lot of political handicappers are asking now that Newt, as he is universally known in Washington, has decided to enter the 2012 campaign, with an announcement expected on Wednesday. Until recently, most of my colleagues assumed that the former speaker of the House, who flirted with running four…

The lead story in Thursday’s National section of the New York Times treated with respect an anti-military temper tantrum from the left-wing town of Burlington, Vermont by Abby Goodnough, "In a Green Town, Activists See Red Over Lockheed Martin." While Times stories involving conservative complaints are invariably overloaded with "conservative" labels, Goodnough included only one mention of…

Obama’s "deliberate, almost scholarly" approach to foreign policy may be obtaining mixed results at best, but New York Times reporter Mark Landler trumpeted the White House line that the killing of Osama bin Laden would enable Obama to "reset" American policy in the Arab world: "Obama Seeks Reset in Arab World – Speech Likely to Put Bin Laden’s Death in Context of Uprisings." After years of…

Speaker John Boehner will deliver the commencement address at the Catholic University of America on Saturday, inspiring a letter of protest from Catholic professors claiming the Republican budget resolution for 2012 "will hurt the poor, the elderly and the vulnerable, and that he therefore has failed to uphold basic Catholic moral teachings." New York Times religion reporter Laurie Goodstein…

Newt Gingrich: He’s no Mario Cuomo. New York Times political writer Matt Bai’s "Political Memo" Wednesday was pretty hostile to the battle-scared Republican leader considering a 2012 run for president: "Gingrich’s Run Reflects His Sense of History." Bai led off by asking "Whatever can Newt Gingrich be thinking?" given that he "has never been elected to anything outside his old Congressional…

New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes was with the president in El Paso, Texas, inspiring Latino voters for his 2012 reelection by pushing Congress to hack a "path to citizenship for illegal immigrants." It’s a long shot in a Republican-controlled Congress, on an issue Obama did not press when the Democrats had big majorities in the House and Senate, but those points were buried in her 1,100-…

Quirky liberal California Gov. Jerry Brown (elected to the post for the second time) was glorified in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine story by reporter Adam Nagourney in "Jerry Brown’s Last Stand." Brown proceeded to answer the reporters’ questions with a display of self-confident humor and a command of facts, history and language that befits a man in the eighth decade of his life, as he…

New York Rangers hockey player and team "enforcer" Sean Avery is speaking out in support of gay marriage in New York State as part of an ad series sponsored by the left-wing Human Rights Campaign. He was profiled in glowing terms in a New York Times news story by John Branch in Sunday's sports section, "In Rarity, a Player Speaks Out for Gay Rights." But how have the paper's columnists treated…

New York Times congressional reporter Carl Hulse, whose reporting has been somewhat more balanced of late, reverted to old partisan habits in Monday’s story, "Democrats’ Plan Would Offset Deficit by Ending Big Oil’s Tax Breaks." Hulse pushed Democratic enthusiasm over the party's latest talking points attempting to place Republicans on the defensive, this time managing to find Democratic…

Michael Moore and others on the far left have taken to moral preening over the killing of Osama bin Laden, finding it unseemly to celebrate the death of a man that killed 3,000 American citizens. (Of course, people would have cheered if Osama had been merely captured and not killed.) Friday's New York Times story by Benedict Carey validated that left-wing trend under the headline "Celebrating a…

Thursday's New York Times lead editorial defended the paper's left-wing ideological ground against conservative arguments that the killing of Osama bin Laden is a vindication of harsh interrogation methods used on terrorist detainees in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere: "The Torture Apologists – Efforts to justify torture after the Bin Laden killing are cynical and destructive."              As…

President Bush received a short-term boost in a New York Times poll when Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003, his job approval rating rising to 58% from 50%, while the assassination of Osama bin Laden similarly benefitted President Obama in yesterday's NYT/CBS poll, 57% to 46%. Yet it was Obama who got the warmer initial greeting on the New York Times's front page. The first three…

In Wednesday’s “Good Feeling Gone, In Congress, Anyway,“ New York Times reporters Jennifer Steinhauer and Carl Hulse suggested it was unseemly for Republicans to not accede to President Obama on domestic issues, after the killing of Osama bin Laden by Navy SEALS in Pakistan. The article superficially appears to be an even-handed “pox on both houses“ story, but the text provided a tableaux of…

The New York Times quickly moved to quash suggestions that “enhanced interrogation” like waterboarding may have yielded useful intelligence in the killing of Osama bin Laden. Moving to protect the paper’s ideological investment that such methods are both brutal and ineffective was Wednesday’s front-page defense by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage, “Harsh Methods Of Questioning Debated Again.”…