TimesWatch

New York Times reporter Andrea Elliott won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for a series of articles about Sheik Reda Shata, an imam in Brooklyn. In a speech to the Times newsroom after her victory, her editor lauded the series for helping to tear down "the wall of hatred” against Muslims in America. Sunday’s similar, 8,400-word magazine cover profile, “A Marked Man In America,” featured Yale Ph.D.…

Monday's New York Times “news analysis,” “President Underscores Similarities With Brazilians, but Sidesteps One,” found reporters Alexei Barrionuevo and Jackie Calmes with Obama in Rio de Janeiro highlighting the president’s positive reception in Brazil, inspiring the citizenry "because of his African heritage." From a visit to this city’s most infamous slum to a national address amid the…

Chief  New York Times “Caucus” blog contributor Michael Shear celebrated Bracket Obama in a Saturday morning post on the president's college basketball tournament pool picks --“Obama’s N.C.A.A. Bracket Is One of the Best.” The wins just keep piling up for the president, at least on the court, in Shear’s telling. Being president is an ego trip. So you would have thought President Obama wouldn’…

Radical Chic: Times Relaunches Mag With Hagiography of Terrorist Helper “Such an outpouring of rage at a 40-year-old woman, mother to a toddler, who was convicted in her mid-20s of abetting a terrorist plot that never took place, is a measure of the degree to which Peruvians are still traumatized by the violence that convulsed their country during the years when the Shining Path warred…

On Friday the New York Times broke its near-silence on its new digital subscription plan with a front-page story by media reporter Jeremy Peters. As of Monday, March 28, visitors to nytimes.com can read 20 stories a month for free. After that, readers get several pay options, one being a $15-a-month fee for full web access. Print subscribers are unaffected. Peters encapsulated the concerns…

On Thursday the House voted 228-192 to end direct federal funding of NPR, but “Caucus” correspondent Michael Shear on Friday morning dismissed the move as a “distraction” in “NPR Vote One of Many Distractions to Come.” The vote by House Republicans Thursday to strip National Public Radio of much of its federal funding is an early example of the ways in which narrow issues are likely to…

Last Sunday, Frank Rich filed his last column for the Week in Review, “Confessions of a Recovering Op-Ed Columnist.” Rich is joining his friend and former Times Magazine editor Adam Ross at New York magazine. Rich’s farewell is typically self-indulgent: "My own idiosyncratic bent as a writer, no doubt a legacy of my years spent in the theater, is to look for a narrative in the many…

Thursday’s New York Times featured a puffball profile by Jeremy Peters of Jay Carney, the recently installed White House press secretary and former reporter for Time magazine undergoing a trial by fire in the wake of international crises. Carney left Time after the election to become communications director for Vice President Biden before getting his White House promotion. The story headline…

The New York Times versus state spending cuts. Reporter Sabrina Tavernise went to the downtrodden town of Gallipollis, Ohio, and collected a grab bag of sympathetic liberal anecdotes about government workers threatened by a bill that would restrict public-sector unions, for Wednesday’s “Ohio Town Sees Public Job As Only Route To Middle Class.” Tavernise focused solely on the plight of low-…

I’ve given New York Times environmental reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal some grief for her ever-expanding damage list of events and patterns caused by global warming, so I’ll give her some credit for her Sunday Week in Review piece on the NIMBY phenomenon among liberal environmentalists: “Green Development? Not in My (Liberal) Backyard.” Though Rosenthal doesn’t question the environmental…

New York Times media reporter and columnist David Carr discussed the surprising recent audience gains of the newly controversial National Public Radio in “Gains For NPR Are Clouded,” featured on the front of Monday’s Business Day section. Carr sometimes grasps the conservative point of view on media issues, but on Monday he joined his boss, Executive Editor Bill Keller, in chiding the…

The New York Times provided decent front-page coverage of the emerging scandal that took down top executives at National Public Radio, a hidden-camera sting that caught top fundraiser Ron Schiller making prejudicial remarks against Republicans in general and the Tea Party movement in particular. The backlash resulted in the resignation of Ron Schiller as well as NPR President and chief…

The New York Times over the weekend was still insisting the defeat of public-sector unions in Wisconsin actually heralds the revival of the Democratic Party. Saturday’s “Political Memo” teamed tea-party beat reporter Kate Zernike (pictured below) with Monica Davey for "Democrats See Wisconsin Loss As Galvanizing." It came on the heels of Friday’s pro-union coverage, including "In Wisconsin…

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller’s latest sniping at Fox News garnered some unsympathetic media attention. Keller told a New York college audience March 3 that "I think if you're a regular viewer of Fox News, you're among the most cynical people on planet Earth. I cannot think of a more cynical slogan than 'Fair and Balanced'.”   The Daily Beast media reporter Howard Kurtz…