Ian Urbina

On the eve of the final presidential debate, Wednesday’s New York Times went after Donald Trump cover to cover, with attempts to shame the Republican nominee and a cavalier dismissal of his allegations of election rigging as racist and paranoid, though the Times was quite amenable to Democratic conspiracy theories about Bush stealing the 2004 election. Wednesday’s off-lead story by Trip Gabriel…

New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane gave a dressing down to reporter Ian Urbina’s heavily criticized recent Sunday front-page article on natural gas extraction, “Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush,” in his Sunday column, “Clashing Views on the Future of Natural Gas.” The benign headline concealed a reasonably incisive critique, accusing Urbina of making unsubstantiated…

New York Times reporters Danny Hakim and Nicholas Confessore filed another in a series of front-page stories Friday  revolving around the natural gas industry, especially the “fracking” process by which natural gas is obtained from shale and is opposed by liberal environmentalists. This time the scene is the paper’s own backyard: “Cuomo Moving To End a Freeze On Gas Drilling.” The Cuomo…

The front page of Wednesday’s National section of the New York Times featured the suddenly ubiquitous Ian Urbina advancing the paper’s agenda against the natural gas industry, as he’s been doing all week: “Lawmakers Seek Inquiry Of Natural Gas Industry.” Luckily for the Times, it found a few liberal Democrats to keep the story going by calling for an investigation into industry practices.…

For a paper so eager to wean us off “our addiction to foreign oil,” the New York Times is pretty squeamish when it comes to the actual alternatives. Ian Urbina’s Sunday lead story was the paper's latest attack on the natural gas industry, “Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush – Productivity of Shale Wells Is a Concern – Investor Flood Spurs Talk of Bubble.” That was followed by…

After all the front-page caterwauling about “anonymous donors” supposedly “buying the election” by running ads favoring the GOP this election cycle, the New York Times isn’t showing itself overly concerned about actual cases of potential vote fraud involving Democrats. In his Wednesday story “Fraudulent Voting Re-emerges as a Partisan Issue.” reporter Ian Urbina quickly dismissed concerns…

Who knew that two brave twenty-somethings and a skilled mentor constituted America's entire right wing? That's apparently how Ian Urbina at the New York Times sees it. In a subheadline employed in a front-page article in the paper's March 20 print edition (relevant portion shown at right) but not used in the online edition's version, the reporter told readers that the poor, put-upon Association…

Ian Urbina's Saturday New York Times story from the Group of 20 economic meeting in Pittsburgh last weeked, about left-wing and anarchist protesters who took to the streets, came under a headline that misleadingly implied peace abided: "In Pittsburgh, Thousands Stage a Peaceful March for Multiple Causes." Yet in paragraph four we learned there were 66 arrests in downtown Pittsburgh, and "about…

Ever notice the media love to report stories about people fighting the power, unless, of course, the power happens to be something the media favor? A March 31 New York Times article about Cuba's Havana Biennial art festival highlighted several artists whose political statements were in line with the anti-American, communist outlook of the island's regime, while ignoring prominent Cuban blogger…

On Thursday, the New York Times filed another piece cheering Barack Obama for making inroads in a traditionally Republican state -- Ian Urbina's "Both Parties Set Sights on Virginia in November."Back on August 17, the state was North Carolina, and Obama's quest was greeted in the Times with an optimistic story headlined "Obama Backers Mobilize in Bid to Wrest State From Republican Grip." The…