The paper’s pretty good, really, when it comes to arguing for First Amendment protection of violent videogames and depictions of animal cruelty. So let’s be thankful for that. Now if we could only get it to take political speech seriously! [Stoll]
Posts Tagged ‘New York Times’
NYT: Roberts Court “most conservative in decades”
Ilya Shapiro sees some heroic simplification — at the least — going on in that sweeping assertion.
Update: New York bill banning short-term rentals
Advocates have been hawking the ban in the state legislature as a tenant protection measure. To their dismay, however, Gov. Paterson has signaled that he intends to veto the bill. [NYT, earlier] The Times travel section had a story over the weekend praising the new kind of “Social B&B” arrangement as a welcome travel bargain, but the newspaper does not seem to have realized that there is any connection between its two articles.
Salt and the taste of food
Even in the midst of a crusade by its editors and the city’s mayor to attach odium to sodium, the New York Times can’t help reporting on some of the practical complications for those trying to make food palatable.
“Are we going to be overcopped and overlawyered?”
Oh, it’s just a discussion of next season’s TV schedule [Stuart Elliott, New York Times, quoting Horizon Media president Bill Koenigsberg]
Marc Dann cops a plea
The disgraced Ohio Attorney General, a fixture in these columns through much of 2008, has pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count and declined to contest another. He’ll pay a fine and do community service. [Columbus Dispatch via Adler/Volokh] At one point Dann was lionized by the New York Times as a potential “next Eliot Spitzer,” at that time considered an enviable thing to be.
“You shouldn’t trivialize issues of health and safety by calling them nanny issues.”
Finger-wagging from a New York Times interviewer [via Matt Welch, Reason “Hit and Run”]
A crack in the CPSIA concrete?
In what one hopes is a break from the “no legislative fix needed” united front put forward by the law’s advocates, Consumer Product Safety Commission chair Inez Tenenbaum has acknowledged in a letter to Rep. George Radanovich (R-Calif) that at least some legislative action establishing exceptions to the law’s sweeping bans might be helpful. Product Safety Letter has the story. Relatedly:
- Handmade Toy Alliance board member Rob Wilson notes
that “Congress Wrote the CPSIA; Only Congress
Can Amend It“, and the HTA has now had a chance to meet with CPSC commissioners (more from Rick Woldenberg, who also challenges Tenenbaum on the rhinestone ban and notes Rep. Dingell’s efforts to press her on the law’s shortcomings); Carter Wood thinks it’s time for a Senate hearing; - Crafter Whimsical Walney, now out of business as regards children’s goods, is not entirely thrilled about the New York Times’s belated coverage of the CPSIA fiasco;
- The ban on brass, and its effects on school bands and kids’ music generally, comes in for criticism from Ryan Young at CEI Open Market, Deputy Headmistress, Rick Woldenberg again, and a Washington Times editorial;
- “You only know if a product is safe if it’s been tested,” claims Rachel Weintraub of the Consumer Federation of America, drawing
a riposte from Rick Woldenberg; - Glenn Cook at the Las Vegas Review-Journal calls CPSIA the law Congress “refuses to fix“, while Quin Hillyer at the American Spectator calls it the “worst low-profile law on the books“.
PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGES from Elise Bake, Der Ball Der Tiere (“The Animals’ Ball”, German, 1891), courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org.
The New York Times finally reports on CPSIA
[Bumped Monday a.m. for readers who missed it over the weekend]
The piece appears in the business section of Saturday’s Times, and it’s a perfectly good one as far as it goes. It starts off with a wooden toy maker in Ogunquit, Maine, who estimates that it would cost him $30,000 to secure testing for the 80 items he makes, using such materials as maple, walnut oil and local beeswax. It touches on the strains between large and small manufacturers, 
as well as the thrift-store and vintage-book angles. Overall, it’s really not a bad piece of its sort.
Aside from its timing, that is. The Times has now gotten around to covering some of the harm done by this law ten months after the Washington Post and other media had begun reporting the basic outlines of the story; nine and a half months after a furor had built to national proportions, prompting both members of Congress and the CPSC to hurry out supposed clarifications; nine months after hundreds of bloggers were on the case, the law’s effects on thrift stores were making headlines from coast to coast, and the Times’s continuing failure to report on the law’s effects had commentators noting its “weird blind spot” on the issue; eight and a half months after a deeply clueless Times editorial assailed critics of the law who 
“foment needless fears that the law could injure smaller enterprises like libraries, resale shops and handmade toy businesses”; seven and a half months after protests by minibike dealers began drawing wide national coverage; seven months after critics rallied on Capitol Hill, and the Washington Post joined in reporting on the law’s dire effects on vintage (pre-1985) kids’ books; and so on to the present.
Okay, so the Times was — well, not a day late and a dollar short, but more like 300 days late and many billions of dollars in overlooked costs short. Still, let’s be grateful: the paper’s news side has now implicitly rebuked the editorial side’s fantastic, ideologically blinkered dismissal of “needless fears that the law could injure smaller enterprises”. And the Times’s belated acknowledgment of the story can serve as permission for other sectors of the media dependent on Times coverage — including some magazines and network news departments — to acknowledge at last the legitimacy of the story and begin according serious attention to the continuing CPSIA calamity. When they do, they will find much to catch up on. (& welcome Handmade Toy Alliance, Chris Fountain readers)
PUBLIC DOMAIN IMAGE from Ethel Everett, illustrator, Nursery Rhymes (1900), courtesy ChildrensLibrary.org.
Breadth of FTC blogger regs
“PatHMV”, in the Volokh comments:
…make no mistake, these regulations are broad. It’s not just that Joe has to say “I got a free bottle of detergent to review,” when he reviews that detergent. No, the FTC will have the authority to fine Joe if P&G [Procter & Gamble] periodically sends him free bottles of detergent or whatever and he ever writes about ANYTHING that P&G produces, even if they didn’t actually give him that particular product for free and didn’t even ask him to write that specific review. How much free stuff before that obligation kicks in? The regulations don’t tell us; it’s up to a “case-by-case determination” by FTC officials.
I don’t know much about detergent-blogging, so let’s substitute a couple of fact patterns more relevant to news, opinion and public affairs blogging. It’s been much asserted of late that it’s no particular burden to disclose when mentioning a newly published book or quoting from a newsworthy speech that the publisher sent you a review copy or the conference-giver let you into the hall on a press pass or its equivalent. But the regulations clearly contemplate broader disclosures than that. At some point, acceptance of such benefits will be deemed to create a relationship that must be disclosed even on other occasions, when, say, you mention an author or a nonprofit institution in a different context six months later.
An editorial in today’s New York Times, despite a bit of concessionary fluff about not wanting “to hamstring the ability of bloggers and twitterers to report and comment about the world,” enthusiastically endorses the new rules. It says not one word about the dangers of overbreadth, de minimis triviality, chilling effects, or selective enforcement. Nor (unlike the L.A. Times’s far more nuanced editorial) does it inform readers that the FTC is proposing in some respects to regulate social media more stringently than traditional media outlets such as the Times itself. Here’s the analysis from Citizen Media Law:
As noted above, a particularly remarkable feature of the “material connections” disclosure requirement is that it apparently does not apply to traditional media to the same extent that it does to online media.
The FTC’s justifications for this distinction are not entirely clear, but they appear to rely on two assumptions. First, the FTC assumes that traditional media exercises “independent editorial responsibility” in writing reviews and that bloggers and social media users may not. The FTC even suggests that reviews published on “an Internet news website with independent editorial responsibility” would be treated like those published in a traditional brick-and-mortar periodical. Guides, at 47 n.101 (emphasis added). Second, the FTC seems to assume that freebies for traditional news reporters are “reasonably expected by the audience,” whereas freebies for bloggers and influential Twitterers are not. These assumptions may be justified when the comparison is between sleazy buzz marketers and much of the traditional press, but they’re less convincing when the comparison is between serious online commentators and the offline press.
Earlier coverage here and here (& welcome Glenn Reynolds/Instapundit, Jonathan Adler/Volokh readers).
World-turned-upside-down alert: Daily Kos is making sense on the topic of how book reviewing works.
And: Daniel Kalder of the Guardian Books Blog speculates on why the NY Times’ editorial “purred with approval” of the new regs in such an “impressively superficial” way.