The New York Times magazine launched another emotional attack on Wisconsin's Republican (and presidential hopeful) Gov. Scott Walker, whom the paper cannot forgive for successfully taming his state's public unions and then surviving an expensive, union-funded recall election. Contributor Dan Kaufman's romanticized, pro-union 5,700-word cover story was advertised as "Labor's Last Stand -- Scott Walker and the dismantling of American unions." A pull quote from a union official captures the tone: "Wisconsin has become a kind of laboratory for oligarchs to implement their political and economic agenda."
Latest from Clay Waters
June 14, 2015, 7:33 AM EDT
June 12, 2015, 12:54 PM EDT
New York Times culture reporter Dave Itzkoff weighs in on comedian Jerry Seinfeld calling the younger generation too politically correct for comedy with an odd, condescending criticism: "Perhaps some of Mr. Quinn’s working-class bona fides will rub off on Mr. Seinfeld, whose recent remarks on political correctness have seen his man-of-the-people status called into question."
June 8, 2015, 8:45 AM EDT
Primates of Park Avenue is a new memoir by Wednesday Martin that purports to examine and explain the preposterously well-off women of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, much like Jane Goodall studied chimpanzees. Martin's prominent pre-publication essay in the New York Times mocked those "poor little rich women" for betraying feminism by being "dependent and comparatively disempowered." Times reporter Anne Barnard reacted to the essay with a liberal political rant and the paper ran no less than three reviews. But the New York Post outclassed its rival in journalistic integrity, finding many factual errors that will result in the publisher slapping an asterisk on the book.
June 6, 2015, 10:01 PM EDT
The New York Times, after taking online hits over its not-a-parody nytimes.com news flash Friday morning about 17 traffic tickets earned by Marco Rubio and his wife Jeanette over an 18-year period, doubled down by reprinting the blog post in Saturday's print edition under the headline: "Plenty of Notice for Rubios on the Road." Seemingly every election cycle, the Times embarrasses itself with a partisan pro-Dem hit job that backfires in its face.
June 5, 2015, 11:55 AM EDT
Catherine Rampell, a Washington Post opinion columnist and previously a New York Times business reporter, rehashed the tired old cliché that the Republican Party has shifted so far right that not even Ronald Reagan would be welcome in "today's shrunken GOP tent." We also learn that liberal, anti-war, pro-partial birth abortion Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee was actually a conservative. Who knew?
June 4, 2015, 10:34 PM EDT
Another day, another batch of poll results from the New York Times pushing a liberal issue. Yesterday it was campaign finance. Thursday's front page brought the paper's latest installment of the paper's ongoing obsession with "income inequality," "Inequality Troubles Americans Across Party Lines, a Poll Finds," with special pressure on what it would mean for the Republicans in 2016.
June 3, 2015, 10:36 PM EDT
The New York Times is still bitter over the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, which allowed businesses to give unlimited sums of money to campaigns on behalf of favorite candidates. While hailing poll findings showing alienated Americans against "the regime of untrameled momey," the NYT buried the fact that the American people care very little about the issue, compared to jobs and the economy.
June 1, 2015, 10:14 PM EDT
Two U.S. Senators -- one Republican, the other a socialist who votes with the Democrats -- are outside candidates for president. Both were profiled in Monday's New York Times, but with quite different results. While Rand Paul's anti-surveillance crusade was caricatured as cynical "sloganeering," socialist Bernie Sanders' modest Iowa crowds (100 people instead of 50?) were hailed as a liberal insurrection.
May 31, 2015, 5:47 PM EDT
The New York Times classless liberal columnist Paul Krugman has a reputation for exploiting tragedy for partisan gain, and did so again Sunday afternoon, writing about former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, accused of using hush money to cover up sexual misconduct with a former student: "Defense of traditional values played a big role in the 2004 campaign....But what we’re now learning about the Speaker of the House during those years is beyond anything one could have imagined."
May 29, 2015, 1:44 PM EDT
The New York Times' hypocrisy regarding displays of "offensive" religious imagery runs unabated, as shown in a Friday article on the sale of Chris Ofili's controversial painting "The Holy Virgin Mary," which shows the Virgin clotted with elephant dung -- accompanied by a photograph of the painting, despite the paper's smug declaration after the Charlie Hebdo massacre that it would not reprint a cartoon of Muhammad because it did not "publish images...deliberately intended to offend religious sensibilities."
May 29, 2015, 11:15 AM EDT
After hailing the Marxist-flavored brand of "liberation theology" Catholicism in Latin America on its front page May 24, the New York Times demonstrated more strange new respect for religion of the left-wing variety, with an adulatory profile of Sister Megan Rice, imprisoned for breaking into a uranium-enriching facility and splattering the building "with blood and antiwar slogans," which the online headline benignly terms "anti-nuclear activism."
May 21, 2015, 12:23 PM EDT
What would America do without socialist European experts to guide us? New York Times reporter Nicola Clark delivered the latest Euro-flavored knee-jerk response to the deadly Amtrak crash. Clark assumed the crash was caused by insufficient funding, even though findings indicate the train was going double the speed limit around a tight curve when it derailed: "Low U.S. Rail Spending Leads to Poor Safety, Experts Say."
May 20, 2015, 10:30 AM EDT
When Hollywood-based New York Times reporter Brooke Barnes filed "Censoring Anti-Muslim Video Was Wrong, Court Says," on Tuesday, one vital scene was left on the cutting room floor, which could have reminded readers of an inconvenient controversy involving Hillary Clinton: Benghazi. In 2012, Barnes co-wrote a slanted story on the same subject -- the Youtube clip blamed for mass rioting among Islamic extremists. Barnes' story appeared under a headline that blamed the filmmaker, not the radical rioters: "After Fueling Deadly Protests, No Regret."
May 16, 2015, 10:01 PM EDT
The front of Sunday's New York Times will evidently be blessed with "Death Penalty Leaves Boston Unsure of Itself." The paper found the death sentence handed down to convicted Boston Marathon terrorist bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev a distasteful "blot" on Boston's compassionate liberal reputation, which has rendered the finish line "a place of ambivalence," with no end of self-righteous Bostonian handwringing on the matter.
May 15, 2015, 2:54 PM EDT
New York Times political reporter Michael Barbaro made print with his gushy mini-profile of Ivy Ziedrich, the Young Democrat turned instant left-wing heroine for her testy exchange with Jeb Bush over ISIS and his brother's presidential legacy: "Student Who Stood Up To Debate ISIS With Bush."
May 15, 2015, 11:34 AM EDT
ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos, who helped President Bill Clinton juggle various scandals during the 1992 campaign and as White House communication director, has apologized for failing to disclose a total of $75,000 in donations to the controversial Clinton Foundation, even before grilling Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash. The New York Times ran a surprising front-page story , "Stephanopoulos Gifts Reinforce G.O.P. Doubts," which actually touched on examples of Stephanopoulos bias against the GOP, though claiming that such bias had previously been only "circumstantial." Oh really?
May 13, 2015, 10:21 PM EDT
New York Times White House correspondent Michael Shear specializes in one-sided fawn-a-thons over President Obama, and Wednesday's report on a panel discussion at Georgetown University featuring Obama talking race and poverty, was the work of a master of the craft: "Obama Urges Unity in Poverty Fight." Shear, who carried Obama's water over the President's anti-business "you didn't build that" comment, and even bragged about the president's NCAA basketball bracket in 2011 ("Mr. Obama knows his hoops"), failed to issue a single critical comment on Obama's big-spending solutions to racial problems.
May 13, 2015, 10:43 AM EDT
New York Times campaign reporter Jeremy Peters on Tuesday lent libertarian-Republican Sen. Rand Paul some slight, cynical support toward his attempt to repeal the Patriot Act, yet maintained his personal hostility toward both the GOP, which "demands fealty to hawkish dogma on national security and defense," and the candidate himself, who "can't stop swearing" and whose "mouth gets him in trouble."
May 9, 2015, 8:10 PM EDT
Conservative Party leader David Cameron led his party to a shocking outright win in Thursday's general election in Britain. But the honeymoon is already over for Cameron, at least on the front page of the New York Times, which featured Steven Erlanger's "news analysis" of the win by the mean and "nasty party": "To Cameron, the Tory Victor, Go the Headaches."
May 8, 2015, 3:43 PM EDT
The New York Times devoted valuable front-page, over-the-fold space and a banner photo to a story on Sen. Marco Rubio campaigning in Iowa, and came down hard on the GOP as an old, stodgy, white party: "Rubio's Immigrant Story, and an Aging Party in Search of a Spark."