The folks at the New York Times must believe not only that their reporters are entitled to inject their opinions into hard-news stories, but that they can also inject their own "facts." Oh, and they can change those facts at will over time to fit the circumstances.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg's Wednesday story about the city's $6.4 million settlement with the family of Freddie Gray appearing in Thursday's print edition is a perfect case in point. Stolberg recast events following Gray's death to claim that there was only one night of rioting, when there were clearly two — even though contemporaneous coverage at the Times itself identified two separate nights of riots.

On Saturday, "more than 20,000" people — perhaps as many as 25,000 to 30,000, according to some police — marched through the streets of Birmingham, Alabama at a Glenn Beck-led "Restoring Unity" rally chanting "All Lives Matter." The event has been described as possibly "the largest march in Birmingham since the civil rights marches of 1963."

Searches at Google News and at the Associated Press's main national and "Big Story" sites indicate that no establishment press outlet gave the rally national coverage. The AP only managed to push out terse three-paragraph and seven-paragraph local stories. Meanwhile, a Reuters story on the less than peaceful march by the "Black Lives Matter" crowd attended by an estimated 325 (compared to an expected 900) in Minneapolis was carried at Yahoo News and the New York Times (at least).

Miami Herald sportwriter and columnist Greg Cote, whose career has entered or is about to enter its third decade, seems to have incorporated a sideline into his work: glib, ignorant political commentary.

One such example surfaced at the end of his August 25 Random Evidence blog post. Apparently, Cote believes that anyone who has ever received any kind of government benefit or has made use of a government service at any time in their life is a flaming hypocrite if they believe that Uncle Sam and other public entities should be able to survive on less money than they currently spend. They're also hypocrites if they believe that the federal government has become far too intrusive in our everyday affairs and threatening to the fundamental freedoms identified in the naton's Constitution. Greg, who clearly should stick to sportwriting, has convinced himself that such people are "anti-government":

Over at the Associated Press this afternoon (later updated), Ken Dilanian, with the help of four other reporters, prepared a lengthy dispatch attempting to defend 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's email and private-server practices. Boiled down to its essence: Boiled down to its essence: "[D]iplomats routinely sent secret material on unsecured email during the past two administrations."

Nice try, guys, but there are two problems with your "many others did it" defense. First, Dilanian and his team quietly admitted that Mrs. Clinton has been lying when claiming in recent weeks that she never sent any classified emails. Additionally, they ignored a December 2009 Executive Order from President Obama which, as Catherine Herridge at Fox News reported this morning, specifies that only "intelligence agencies who own that information in the first place have the authority to declassify it."

In the first major network news program since 2016 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump sparred with liberal Fusion/Univision anchor Jorge Ramos at a press conference on the subject of illegal immigration, ABC’s Nightline was there to circle the wagons for their Disney partner and “America’s best known Latino anchorman.”