New York Times

The New York Times knows how to grab web traffic. One of its most popular articles right now is a Sarah Lyall dispatch from Thursday on the popularity in Britain of "dogging" -- public sex, sometimes with an audience of admirers. Lyall takes a long time getting around to critics (paragraph 12), and then it sounds like this: Britons are a tolerant bunch, and most probably would not care who…

The New York Times, which is opposed to First Amendment protections for political advertising, has an untrammeled view of free speech when it comes to violent video games and even the picketing of soldiers' funerals by the family of Fred Phelps, infamous for their "God Hates Fags" signs and other despicable messages. The New York Times Co. has filed a "friend of the court" brief with the Supreme…

UPDATE: Do New York Times reporters read NewsBusters? NYT stealthily inserts a reference to 9/11 without informing readers of an update. The updated version appeared in Friday's print edition.In the latest installment of its pro-bono PR campaign for the Ground Zero mosque, the New York Times attempted to draw parallels between opposition to the mosque and opposition to the construction of St.…

Two New York Times reporters were out to lunch, while the Old Gray Lady's layers of fact-checkers were apparently asleep at the switch. In an item which contained a number of oddities, Times reporters Stephanie Clifford and Catherine Rampell wrote the following: Over all, full-time work in retail is slightly down. The number of people employed in the retail sector in August fell 4.9 percent, to…

Foiled Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad was sentenced to life imprisonment on Tuesday, which was noted by all Big Three networks. But a look at the transcripts shows that ABC, CBS, and NBC all have one obvious thing in common: words like "Obama" are never uttered. (The same happened in The New York Times and The Washington Post.)Can anyone imagine if Shahzad attempted this in 2008, the word "…

Kate Zernike, the New York Times's Tea Party reporter, can add another scalp to her collection. This one belongs to ‘obscure' Nobel Prize-winning economist Freidrich Hayek and his wacky theories like "rule of law.""Once-obscure texts by dead writers" such as Hayek, wrote Zernike, are full of "long-dormant ideas" and strange arguments like Hayek's claim, as summarized by Zernike, that "government…

Medical marijuana is an evergreen (pardon the pun) topic for alternative weeklies, along with the return of vinyl records. The recent loosening of federal regulations under Obama have pushed the issue into the mainstream, with one surprising side effect -- a huge boost in ad sales for alternative papers and even some mainstream dailies, as medical marijuana businesses like "Happy Buddah" and "…

As Justice Elena Kagan takes the bench on her first "first Monday in October," the new Special Report by Clay Waters of TimesWatch strongly underlines the media favoritism offered by the New York Times. The report, Supremely Slanted, offers a pile of bias tidbits like these:  Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg gushed over Kagan on a June 28 podcast at nytimes.com, on the eve of the hearings, in…

On Sunday, New York Times labor-beat reporter Steven Greenhouse attended the left-wing “One Nation” rally for “Liberal Groups rally in Washington, Offering a Challenge to the Tea Party.” Unusually, Greenhouse led off with a specific (and rather generous) crowd estimate of “tens of thousands,” something the paper was unwilling to do for larger rallies held in D.C. by the Tea Party and talk show…

Here's something you wouldn't expect to read in the New York Times: Republicans are better informed about political issues than blacks, Hispanics, and young people."Big-city liberals and their blogging buddies love to paint Tea Partiers as yokels with incoherent candidates and language-mauling signs," began Charles Blow's column Saturday."The unpleasant fact that these liberals rarely mention,…

As the Democrat-loving media pile on California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman over the illegal alien status of her former housekeeper, a strange thing happened at the New York Times Friday: columnist David Brooks published a positive piece about the former eBay CEO.In fact, "The Austerity Caucus" never mentioned this new scandal that has most mainstream media members doing…

As liberal Justice Elena Kagan takes her place on the Supreme Court next week, she could thank The New York Times for making her confirmation process smoother. Ever since Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork and he was rejected by the Senate in 1987 for his views and not his character or qualifications, confirmation battles for liberals have become less like judicial seminars and more like…

New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman is clearly unhappy about the Tea Party, so much so that he considers the movement "not that important."Instead, he envisions another group, "which stretches from centrist Republicans to independents right through to centrist Democrats," sitting silently out there in America waiting for the right leader to emerge.So wrote Friedman Wednesday in his "The…

It’s a really skewed view of the relationship between citizens and the government – that anything you earn and get to keep by not paying to the government in the form of taxes is a show of benevolence from the government. But that’s apparently the view of Richard H. Thaler, professor at the University of Chicago. In the Sept. 26 New York Times, Thaler, declares that tax cuts are a gift in his…