TimesWatch

New York Times chief economics writer David Leonhardt argued against the deficit-reducing House Republican budget written by Rep. Paul Ryan in his Wednesday front-page Business Day column “A Lopsided Proposal for Medicare.” Instead, Leonhardt called for higher taxes on "affluent Americans"(his reasoning: All wealthy countries do it). It’s one of his favorite arguments for redistributing the…

The ambitious, cost-trimming House Republican budget proposal put forward by Rep. Paul Ryan “is not going to become law anytime soon, if ever,” New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes assured us in her Wednesday “news analysis,” “A Conservative Vision, With Bipartisan Risks.” Yet it still “poses huge political risks for Republican candidates for Congress and for the White House in 2012.” A front-…

Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, newly minted war-monger. On March 24 the Iraq war dove claimed the U.S. was being welcomed as liberators in Libya. On Sunday he applauded what the column’s text box admitted was “our inconsistent intervention in Libya,” headlined with a bleeding-heart plea: “Is It Better to Save No One?” He even called for "a SWAT team of Libyans and coalition forces…

Respectable economist turned partisan New York Times columnist Paul Krugman weighed in at his nytimes.com blog Tuesday morning on the ambitious budget proposal for Fiscal Year '12, released by the chairman of the House Budget Committee, the formerly flim-flam-sauce-drenched Rep. Paul Ryan. In his post, headlined “The Threat Within,” Krugman at least held off the childish insults this time,…

For “Secrecy in Shreds,” his latest column for the New York Times’s Sunday magazine, Executive Editor Bill Keller conducted a surprisingly affable conversation with conservative journalist Gabriel Schoenfeld of Commentary magazine, who last year published “Necessary Secrets,” a book highly critical of Keller and the Times revealing details of and thus wrecking two successful terrorist-fighting…

If the New York Times isn’t a liberal newspaper, then why do so many humorless liberals complain when it makes a lighthearted detour off the P.C. reservation? The retooled letters-to-the-editor page contains an amusing revelation of the delicate liberal sensitivities of the paper’s readership. The Times flagged a variety of complaints about a feature in the previous issue, showing nine…

Michael Powell’s New York Times story on the latest job figures made the lead slot in Saturday’s Times, with a headline portraying a revitalized Obama and a defensive G.O.P. “U.S. Posts A Gain Of 216,000 Jobs, A Lift For Obama -- Private Sector On Rise -- As Jobless Rate Falls to 8.8%, White House Warns G.O.P.” One might not think an 8.8% unemployment rate would be cause for swagger and…

The New York Times vs. state spending cuts, take four. Reporter Lizette Alvarez led off Friday’s National section with a story on the plight of unemployed Floridians: “The Jobless See A Lifeline at Risk - Florida Eyes Cut in Benefits.” Alvarez’s story hyped the liberal compassion factor even more than a similar story in Wednesday’s Times, on a move in Michigan that will also trim state…

The New York Times vs. state spending cuts, take three. After the New York State legislature passed a $132.5 billion budget under new Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo that cuts overall spending by two percent, Albany-based reporter Thomas Kaplan went looking for budget victims for Friday’s “After an On-Time Passage of a Pared-Back Budget, Bracing for the Pain to Come.” Not once did the Times…

New York Times food writer Mark Bittman’s Thursday morning nytimes.com blog post on the end of his politically motivated four-day fast, “Stating the Obvious: Hunger Is a Disease,” is a followup to his bizarre left-wing rant on Wednesday’s op-ed page, where he claimed proposed spending cuts in the new House budget plan would “quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry…

Thursday’s front-page story by New York Times investigative reporter Mike McIntire, “Odd Alliance: Business Lobby And Tea Party.” accused a Tea Party group, the Institute for Liberty, of pushing the agenda of Asia Pulp & Paper, an Indonesian corporation fighting U.S. tariffs. Whatever the merits of this particular complaint, this sort of prominently placed, hostile investigation of a…

A Wednesday post by economics reporter Catherine Rampell on the paper's Economix blog hits hard at the common liberal target of "extreme" and "stark" income inequality in America: “Inequality Is Most Extreme in Wealth, Not Income.” Rampell’s word choice sent the message (perhaps unconsciously) that income isn’t earned through hard work or talent but is instead passively and undeservedly “…

Barack Obama, war president? The Times’s chief online political reporter Michael Shear gave the president, who ran on an anti-war platform, some militant reelection advice in his Wednesday morning “Caucus” post, “The Case for Obama Campaigning as a Foreign Policy President.” In the past several weeks, events outside the United States have commanded as much of Mr. Obama’s attention as the…

Puritanical New York Times food writer Mark Bittman made a rare appearance on the op-ed page Wednesday to call attention to his latest liberal project: “Why We’re Fasting.” Bittman, food columnist for the Times Sunday magazine, has also written news stories for the paper from his perch as resident food scold. He made the front page of the Sunday Week in Review in February 2010 with his nanny-…