New York Times

The New York Times finally noticed what Washington has obsessed over the last few days -- the dust-up between veteran Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward and the Obama White House over an email from a White House aide (apparently Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council) who emailedhis disagreement with Woodward's characterization that the White House had moved…

In "G.O.P.'s Ideological Split Appears in Virginia Governor's Race," New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel saw a controversial candidate on one side of the Virginia governor's race -- Republican candidate Kenneth Cuccinelli, Virginia's attorney general, who has support in the Tea Party and social conservative wings of the party. His likely Democratic opponent? Terry McAuliffe, former chairman…

Spinning the sequester in the New York Times. After weeks of cringing over the supposedly damaging federal cuts due to take effect tomorrow (even as the public shrugs them off) Jonathan Weisman made an 180-degree turn on the front of Thursday's paper: "Parties Focus On the Positive As Cuts Near." The text box: "An onerous possibility turns out to be not quite so onerous." Suddenly the Times…

New York Times reporter Kirk Johnson, hypersensitive to conservative defeat and retreat in the Western states, using an upcoming Supreme Court case as an excuse to lead more cheers for gay rights in "deeply conservative" Idaho in Wednesday's "Gay Couples Are Navigating A New Geography of Marriage." He sympathetically profiled a couple living in Idaho, a state they consider backward: "For them…

The front page of Wednesday's New York Times featured another lament for the supposed new "austerity" encompassing the nation, from economics reporter (and enthusiastic Keynesian) Binyamin Appelbaum, "As Budget Cuts Loom, Austerity Has Killed Off Government Jobs." An accompanying graphic with text insisted "Austerity Is Already Here." Federal government spending often falls after recessions…

New York Times investigative reporter Michael Moss's huge cover story, "The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food is a super-sized 9,400 words long, eclisped perhaps only by Matt Bai's slanted magazine cover story on the debt fight in last April. A. Barton Hinkle saved everyone some time with a succinct sarcastic summary column. A recent cover story in The New York Times Magazine…

The New York Times sent reporters scurrying around the country to deliver Tuesday's dire dose of sequestration fear -- a full page (with photos) of impending cuts to a range of federal programs starting Friday. Lead reporter Michael Cooper set the groaning board: The owner of a Missouri smokehouse that makes beef jerky is worried about a slowdown in food safety inspections. A Montana school…

Normally, NewsBusters does not criticize editorials. However, on ocassion, one comes across one that is simply too full of myths and false statements that an exception has to be made to the rule. On Friday, The New York Times published an editorial examining sequestration and taxes. The editorial was loaded with inaccuracies, misleading statements, and significant lacks of clarification.…

Reporting on former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel's nomination to serve Obama as secretary of defense, the New York Times' Jeremy Peters tried to imply as he has before that the Republican move to filibuster Hagel, who bombed in hearings, was both uncollegial and unprecedented. But Peters had to stretch in his Tuesday piece, limiting his examples to the narrow fact that Hagel is the first…

New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer missed the point in her Tuesday take on Michelle Obama's "star turn" on Oscar night to announce the award for best picture at the Academy Awards, "A Tale of Secret Talks and Intrigue Behind Michelle Obama's Oscars Appearance." She may not have walked the red carpet, but Michelle Obama -- all bangs and biceps and bling -- had her own star turn during…

It's hard to imagine that Nicholas Confessore and his editors at the overwhelmingly Obama-friendly New York Times were just making things up when he reported over the weekend in a Page A1 story that the Obama campaign's Organizing For America operation, now "rebooted" as the supposedly independent Organizing For Action, "will rely heavily on a small number of deep-pocketed donors ... whose…

Times personal finance reporter Tara Siegel Barnard would love the U.S. to embrace Europe's cradle-to-grave safety net mind-set, lumping America with apparently inferior countries like Liberia, Suriname and Papua New Guinea for the sin of not offering paid maternity leave. Barnard made the argument in Saturday's Business section, in her first column since returning from maternity leave, "In…

Over the weekend the New York Times painted the $85 billion in budget cuts that will start kicking in Friday – known in Washington-speak as sequestration -- in dramatic terms, falsely heralding a new age of "government austerity" (since when?) and passing along stories of budget-cut fear-mongering from the state level. Saturday's lead from Michael Cooper painted a White House-friendly horror…

In the aftermath of the Oscars, New York Times fashion reporter Eric Wilson bizarrely documented an example of "feminine repression" on the red carpet in Monday's arts section. Almost as silly was a Critics' Notebook from the painfully political movie review duo Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, who delivered the shocking news that Hollywood movies are less than historically reliable, while…