Clay Waters

Under the pretense of journalism, reporter Maggie Astor provided some public relations with the valuable New York Times-imprimatur for the children’s crusade for gun control (and a laundry list of made-up left-wing issues like “systems of oppression”) in Thursday’s lead National story, “Speakers, Students, Activists, Survivors – On the road with teenagers from the March for Our Lives.”

CNN’s Twitter account used an old liberal standby, “seize,” to denigrate Trump’s (factual) statement about the Tuesday morning terror attack in London: "President Donald Trump seizes on what he calls a 'terrorist attack' in London, even though the incident is still in the early stages of investigation." CNN's tweet linked to Jennfier Hansler’s equally silly story. Never mind that both the Associated Press and London's mayor had tweeted out similar statements earlier.

A long article in the New York Times Sunday Styles, “Civility and Culture Wars In an Iowa Gun Town – When neighbors disagree but a major voice remains silent.” Jacqui Shine left big hints that Iowans are just too nice to properly confront the NRA board chairman in their midst, “Pete Brownell, a well-known and well-liked local philanthropist....He is also the third-generation C.E.O. of Brownells, a major firearms company whose headquarters are here....His public remarks have been unsurprising in the national conversation, but also strike some as unneighborly."

The New York Times hired Sarah Jeong to write about technology as a member of the paper’s editorial board. Hours later came revelations from Jeong’s obsessively anti-white and anti-police ravings on Twitter, and a subsequent defense of Jeong’s hiring from the paper. Yet none of that recent controversy penetrated into “Inside the Struggle at Twitter Over What Warrants a Ban,” regarding the deplatforming of conspiracy-mongering Alex Jones. In fact, the story shows the paper doubling down on its double standards: Do as we say, not as we do.

New York Times stringer Daniel Politi teamed with the paper’s Brazil bureau chief Ernesto Londono to cover a failed attempt in Argentina to legalize abortion in the first 14 weeks of a pregenancy: “Though Abortion Bill Failed in Argentina, a Movement Took Hold -- A Narrow Loss Inspires Women.” The text box to Friday’s story assured the paper’s pro-choice readership: “‘Abortion will be legal soon. Very soon,’ one woman said.” The online version carried a Reuters photo of “An abortion-rights supporter in Buenos Aires on Thursday after a bill to legalize abortion was defeated.” Who, by the way, was in the act of throwing a colored smoke bomb. The text ignored the eruptions of violence in the aftermath of the defeat of the abortion bill, which it usually does when it comes to left-wing protest violence

Rosie O’Donnell and a motley troupe of Broadway actors past and present bussed down from New York City for a protest “show” in front of the White House on Monday (Broadway’s traditional day off) and the New York Times decided the silliness was worthy of the lead National section story slot Wednesday. Reporter-intern Alexandria Yoon-Hendricks’ “A Free Broadway Show Starring Putin, Trump and Jean Valjean” ignored O’Donnell’s unrepentant Trutherism and took her seriously as an anti-Trump voice, though the two had been personally feuding years before Trump’s presidential campaign.

New York Times reporters Michael Shear and Adam Liptak’s review of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his involvement in Ken Starr’s independent counsel investigation of President Bill Clinton, made the front page of Sunday’s edition. It conveniently served as a defense of the Clintons against the “puritanical” “hatred” of Republicans: “Court Pick, Soldier in the Battle to Impeach Clinton, Has Regrets.” The reporters's opening and closing quotes are from former Clinton adviser current Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, surely a nonpartisan source of objective wisdom on the matter at hand.

Yahoo! writer Hope Schreiber made the site’s front page with her contribution to the controversy over Sarah Jeong, the New York Times’ new editorial board member with a long history of racist anti-white tweets. It’s clear from the headline that Yahoo! considers the whole thing a right-wing hit-job against Jeong: “Right-wing websites target New York Times' new writer over what they call 'anti-white' tweets.” Here’s the Yahoo headline as it appeared in the tab for the story: “Alt-right targets journalist over ‘anti-white’ tweets.”

For years, Michiko Kakutani was the most feared and revered New York Times book critic. Now the reviewer becomes the reviewed with her new book with a self-explanatory title: The Death of Truth – Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. On the plus side, it’s short. Yet this slim, 173-page undersized hardback still manages to be a slow read, dense and repetitive. The widely read Kakutani uses boringly familiar quotes from predictable wells of anti-totalitarian wisdom like Hannah Arendt and George Orwell to attack Trump and the new GOP for abandoning truth, reason, even common decency.