PSA: Don’t drink the water at The New York Times’ Manhattan headquarters. According to an internal memo distributed this morning, two staffers at the paper’s 8th Avenue office, near Times Square, have fallen ill due to suspected water contamination. The memo’s author, vice chairman Michael Golden, said certain water, ice and coffee machines were being shut down until further notice:
Over the past week, The New York Times has busied itself by dissecting TMZ’s graphic video of Ray Rice punching Janay Palmer in an Atlantic City casino. This is partly motivated by professional envy: Executive editor Dean Baquet told The Daily Beast that “TMZ had a great scoop. I wish I had it.” But it’s also motivated by the paper’s misunderstanding of what TMZ actually published.
Between Aaron Schock, Michael Sam, and the male American populace, The New York Times still considers being gay a newsworthy event. But in their latest report on the topic, the paper reveals that a certain number of wealthy, powerful C.E.O.s persuaded the Times to keep a lid on their sexuality. So who are they?
As our own Hamilton Nolan outlined in his universally beloved piece "Against Editors," the typical career track in journalism pushes talented young writers to become editors, where they get comfy and grow old... and lose touch of who is famous, leading to sad and embarrassing errors like the following ones from the New York Times.
Following up on its non-endorsement of New York governor Andrew Cuomo's challenger, Zephyr Teachout, the New York Times today endorsed Teachout's running mate, Tim Wu, for lieutenant governor. Because Cuomo is a terrible cynic with no identifiable values, his chosen lieutenant governor candidate, Kathy Hochul, is a right-wing creep added to the ticket to pander to upstate voters. (Or possibly, as the Times theorizes, she's a cynic herself, who pretends to be right-wing to pander to upstate voters.)
The New York Times editorial board, with great pride in its own high-mindedness, has refused to endorse Andrew Cuomo's campaign for renomination as governor of New York in the upcoming Democratic primary. As the Times' reporters have amply documented, Andrew Cuomo is, in his role as a self-appointed champion of clean politics, a gutless fraud at best, and at worst a crook. Having sworn to rid Albany of its toxic and comical culture of gross corruption, he promptly and comically corrupted his own reform effort. The Times editorial board says so—that Cuomo "broke his most important promise."
Alissa J. Rubin, the New York Times Paris bureau chief who has spent much of the past decade anchoring the paper's Iraq and Afghanistan war coverage, was riding in a helicopter that crashed as it was delivering humanitarian aid to Yazidi refugees in northern Iraq today.
Last week, BuzzFeed fired Viral Politics editor Benny Johnson for lifting phrases and sentences from other sources, chiefly Wikipedia—a phenomenon some attributed to Johnson’s lack of training and the Internet’s lack of rules. But at least one trained journalist at the rule-bound New York Times couldn’t resist copying from the online encyclopedia, either.
The wealthy congressman moves easily through his South Carolina district, from his plantation home to Kazoobie Kazoos to Larry Toomer of Bluffton to "a heavyset man with a goatee" sipping tequila from a Solo cup. It's not a Flannery O'Connor grotesque. It's the life of cheating hypocrite Mark Sanford.
