New York Times

It's no secret that most campaigns are heavily funded by big checks from lobbyists, PACs, and rich donors, but President Obama's campaign team is turning away from that assertion, instead showcasing the claim that it is 98-percent-funded by grassroots support. Jim Messina, Obama's campaign manager, said "we did this from the bottom up," pushing the idea that the $86 million fundraising figure…

One has to wonder if departing New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller will leave behind many friends in the newsroom. First he bothered his media-beat reporters by writing of his dislike for new media like Twitter. It turns out he’s not crazy about old media (books) either – at least when writing them take his reporters away on book leave or detracts from their reporting. His upcoming…

In her Tuesday posting on the New York Times's Internet-news blog “Bits,” the unusually named Jennifer 8. Lee (a food writer and former Times staff reporter who now occasionally shows up to write posts for “Bits” and the paper’s local “City Room” blog) interviewed Rebecca MacKinnon of the left-leaning New America Foundation. MacKinnon was speaking at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh about…

He said it, he meant it, and there's no denying it. On Monday, in a statement carried at the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the New York Times (Page A8 of Tuesday's print edition), and elsewhere, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told U.S. troops at Camp Victory in Baghdad: "The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked. And 3,000 Americans — 3,000 not…

The New York Times's chief economics writer David Leonhardt proposed his usual solution – tax hikes – to the ongoing budget and debt-ceiling battles between congressional Republicans and President Obama in his confidently titled Wednesday column “Why Taxes Will Rise In the End.” Leonhardt struggled to ponder why his fellow citizens stubbornly refuse to raise the debt ceiling. Polls show that…

New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes’s latest front-page story on the budget battle displayed typical Times’s labeling bias, with “angry conservatives” but no liberals. Calmes also paid the Republican leadership a backhanded compliment for trying to stop their conservative base from provoking a financial crisis. On Tuesday, Calmes claimed on the front page that Obama was “repositioning”…

The New York Times posted a surprising column by international columnist Roger Cohen that appeared in its international edition Tuesday, “In Defense of Murdoch.” That would be media mogul Rupert Murdoch (a name loathed by all good liberals)whose vast empire of newspapers and television news is under siege after allegations of phone hacking including missing teens, police officers, even a former…

Tuesday’s off-lead New York Times story by Jackie Calmes from Washington claims Obama is now grasping centrism as a weapon in the budget battle. So why has the Times been telling us he has always been a centrist? “Obama Grasping Centrist Banner In Debt Impasse – Talks Remain Stalled – President Urges Biggest Deal Possible Despite G.O.P. Skepticism.” For the last three years we’ve been told…

Monday’s New York Times front-page story by Motoko Rich, “Economy Faces a Jolt as Benefit Checks Run Out,” portrayed massive government spending on unemployment benefits and food stamps as an economic plus, not a potential drain, warning that cutting that funding would be a drag on the fragile recovery. An extraordinary amount of personal income is coming directly from the government.

New York Times Executive Editor and "collapsed Catholic" Bill Keller reviewed “Absolute Monarchs – A History of the Papacy” by John Julius Norwich --the cover review for the Times Sunday Book Review. The issue included an editorial note at the front of the magazine confessing the paper’s rough relationship with the Catholic Church (which Times Watch has documented).   Through the years, The…

President Obama’s budget blueprint may have been unanimously rejected by Congress in late May, but suddenly the president is the courageous, ambitious one on budget talks after issuing new rhetoric indicating a willingness to make cuts in social programs like Medicare.   In his Sunday front-page story, “House Speaker Is Pulling Back On Deficit Deal – $4 Trillion Plan Stalls Over Tax…

It is truly fascinating how liberal media members will do anything to protect the reputation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. On this weekend's "McLaughlin Group," Newsweek's Eleanor Clift revised history to largely absolve the two government-sponsored enterprises for last decade's mortgage collapse while predictably blaming it on Wall Street and of course George W. Bush (video follows with…

Former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert appeared on Thursday night on The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC to discuss how the death penalty demonstrates how America is marred by “such a macho culture, such a violent culture” that we would actually execute murderers and politicians haven't completely banned it. For her part, Maddow tried to imply that there’s race-baiting politics involved,…

The New York Times on Friday once again proved itself to have absolutely no clue how budgets work. In its editorial "Negotiating the Debt Ceiling on a Knife's Edge," the Times - like so many other math-challenged "news" organizations in America today - blamed the current debt ceiling woes on the Bush tax cuts and Republican refusal to raise revenues: