The publisher, reporting staff and editor of smartertimes.com is Ira Stoll, a 28-year-old former managing editor of Forward, a Jewish weekly. At 6 o'clock every morning he picks up a copy of the Times at a Brooklyn news-stand and, within four hours, unleashes an invariably scathing report on something he thinks either ridiculous or wrong.
Categories on the website range from the pedantic—"New York, lack of basic familiarity with" (noting unbearable geographic errors) and "Misspelling of names" (including that of the Sulzberger family, which controls the Times)—to weightier topics such as taxes and immigration. Most of the time, Mr. Stoll is on the look-out for left-wing bias masked as objectivity. He is particularly tough on the citation of allegedly impartial "experts" in back up predictable Times conclusions—that the poor are getting poorer, private education is bad, welfare reform. has failed, public housing is vital, and Republicans and policemen are insensitive, racist or mentally challenged.
Occasionally, Mr. Stoll's pieces precede (or perhaps cause) a correction. He was, for instance, the first to spot that the Times had attacked John Ashcroft, the conservative attorney-general, with a shortened and misleading quotation lifted from another newspaper. More often the sins are of leftish omission. Last weekend's ode to the joys of traveling in Cuba, he points out, avoided "any mention of the country's horrible human-rights record".
Like other zealots, Mr. Stoll sometimes asks too much. Even the weekly newspapers occasionally get things wrong; it would be surprising if a daily as big as the Times never did. And Mr. Stoll's bias, though overt, can get a little boring. This week he nicely skewered an absurdly solemn Times piece about a plan in Connecticut to stop high schools starting work before 8:30 a.m, because teenagers do "not physiologically wake up", for not even wondering whether it might be a good tiling for the little dears to go to bed earlier. But did Mr. Stoll really need to add a carp about those tired teenagers having sex "with the assistance of taxpayer-provided free contraceptives"?
All the same, Mr. Stoll seems to have struck a nerve. In only seven months, with no marketing, he has developed a subscriber list for a daily e-mail of almost 2,000 people (including, inevitably, Newt Gingrich). And the Times seems to be taking some notice. Three of its journalists have already taken him out for lunch.
New York Times was not criticized by the conservative because of being______.
A. extremist
B. humourous
C. unfaithful
D. unopposed
The fifth paragraph implies______.
A. Mr. Stoll is going too far
B. weekly newspapers often make mistakes.
C. the teenagers shouldn't be provided with the contraception
D. Mr. Stoll's action benefits the teenagers
Mt. Russell said Richard had nothing to do with the agreement mentioned because______.
A. Richard didn't want to pay money he owed Ms. Lewis
B. this may affect the trial
C. this may rain Richard's reputation
D. he knew that was the fact