Clay Waters

Reporter Liz Robbins wrapped up the year in left-wing athletic activism on the front of the New York Times sports page New Year’s Day, though she put it in more flattering terms in “Playing for Trophies, and for Change.” Robbins  doesn't seem to like sports: "Long a bastion for abuse, homophobia, misogyny and injury, the sporting world has started to embrace diversity, vulnerability, gender equity and activism." Hooray?

Michiko Kakutani, former chief book critic for the New York Times, saw out the decade in paranoid fashion, laying out her left-wing overview of the 2010s in the Sunday Review, “The End of Normal -- Over the past decade, social media, the Great Recession and Donald Trump combined to bring out the ‘indigenous American berserk." She ranted: "With his calls to 'Make America Great Again,' Mr. Trump appealed to a different sort of nostalgia -- for an era when white men were in charge and women, African Americans, Hispanics and immigrants knew their place."

Rolling Stone’s Peter Wade interviewed NBC political director and Meet the Press host Chuck Todd. Wade provided some publicity for a very special Meet the Press airing December 29, featuring big media bosses discussing the spread of disinformation: "Chuck Todd has had a front-row seat for the spread of disinformation while hosting NBC’s Meet the Press." Todd spouted: "So I do think that is something that this sort of cheering on falsehoods for sport, wow, have we gone off the rails on the right side of the silo of the conversation that’s taking place."

This Christmas, could you please spare a thought for the truly unfortunate: D.C. political journalists deprived of holiday parties surrounded by members of the Trump Administration (whom they despise)? The front of the New York Times Sunday Styles section was a microcosm of self-absorbed journalists indulging themselves over the holidays: “The Pall Before Christmas.” It was written by Shawn McCreesh, previously an editorial assistant to Maureen Dowd and who here shares Dowd’s contemptuous irreverence toward Trump.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof continued his peculiar tradition of devoting columns approaching religious holidays to asking various religious figures if one really had to believe in the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection to be considered a Christian. The latest entry came Sunday, three days before Christmas. He spoke to evangelist author Philip Yancey for “Was Mary a Virgin? Does it Matter?” His opening question: "Merry Christmas! And let me start by asking about that first Christmas. Do you believe in the Virgin Birth? Doesn’t that seem like one of those tall tales that people tell to exaggerate an event’s significance?"

The New York Times has invested three years of hostile coverage on Brexit and mockery of the (once) hopeless crusade of Boris Johnson to become British Prime Minister. Once in office, Johnson was vilified for attempting to lead the United Kingdom out of the European Union. The Times has blamed the Brexit push for, among other things, shorter life spans; racist and Islamophobic attacks, even “Talibanization.” Brexit supporters were mocked for “virtually cultlike certitude"; an opinion contributor insulted Brexit voters as “old people, 80 and above, wearing blank stares.” Feverish anti-Brexit, anti-Boris bias emanated from the Times in the run-up to Election Day December 12, which ended up wildly successful for the Conservative Party.

The New York Times has gotten itself mired in more controversy and embarrassment of its own making while spending the last week desperately trying to put a negative spin on President Trump’s recent executive order to fight anti-Semitism on college campuses: "The order will effectively interpret Judaism as a race or nationality, not just a religion..." Wrong, said people who actually read the order.

Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, the deluded duo of former journalists behind Fusion GPS, the Democratic opposition research group responsible for the discredited “dossier” from British spy Christopher Steele, has put out a calling card for business in Great Britain: “Britain needs its own Mueller report on Russian ‘interference.’” Simpson and Fritsch, who helped snarl Donald Trump and his staff in years of bad-faith investigations, may be aiming for new political markets now that the U.S. establishment has belatedly gotten wise after a devastating Inspector General report.

New York Times reporter Marc Tracy made the front of Friday’s Business section with a story on press outrage over the treatment of late Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs, in “Richard Jewell,” directed by Clint Eastwood. Journalists are suddenly outraged over the common practice of Hollywood fictionalizing stories based on real life by adding details to juice up the story. Many movies have portrayed journalists as fictionally heroic without any complaints. But now that Eastwood is holding up irresponsible journalism in an unflattering light, the press is in full howl.