Within an hour on the morning of Sept. 5, Chicago photographer Tonika Johnson had received a tag on Instagram, a tweet, a Facebook message and text from friends notifying her about the “The Great Divide” a photographic story by the New York Times that highlights the overt disparities in quality of life for residents in…
By BEN LYONS / On July 19, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof wrote that “Hamas sometimes seems to have more support on certain college campuses in America or Europe than within Gaza,” in a column titled “Who’s right and wrong in the Middle East.” If you read the online version of his column, the first link (under the text “on certain college campuses…”) would send you to a Washington Post article on the American Studies Association’s backing an academic boycott of Israeli universities in December 2013.
On Twitter, a few readers asked Kristof about the link. Said Chase Madar (a lawyer and journalist, according to his bio): “The article that you link to about the ASA #BDS resolution does not even mention Hamas, by the way.”
Kristof’s reply was a stunner. He said “[I] write the column, and someone else chooses links later, so don’t read too much into the links except as further resources.” For those following the exchange, this became the bigger story.
By GEORGE SALAMON / Edward Klein has long been nemesis to Hillary Clinton. Now his latest hit on the Clintons, “Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas” has just overtaken Hillary Clinton’s memoir “Hard Choices” in sales on the Times’ own bestseller list. How mortifying that Klein’s dishing of “implausible” dirt on both families was outselling the former Secretary of State’s own display of grand vision and noble compassion the Clintons sell as the raison d’ etre for past and future service in public life. It was too much for the Times’ reporters Amy Chozick and Alexandra Alter. In the second paragraph they label passages in Klein’s bestseller “implausible,” but don’t show us what makes them “implausible.”
By GEORGE SALAMON / The headline on p. A1 of the June 16 New York Times read: “Population Shifts Turning All Politics National.” The story by Ashley Parker and Jonathan Martin drew that conclusion from the results of two elections, the one in Virginia that cost Eric Cantor his position as majority leader in the House and one in Mississippi that could unseat another Republican leader, Senator Thad Cochran. The story proposed that “the axiom that ‘all politics is local’ is increasingly anachronistic.” But it’s just this axiom that inspired Dave Carr’s column on the same day.
Adam Nagourney of The New York Times demonstrated the power of one reporter and one video this week with his story about defiant rancher Cliven Bundy’s racist remarks suggesting blacks were better off as slaves picking cotton. The New York Times was late to the story of Bundy’s refusal to follow federal grazing laws and…