Smarternysun is getting tired of taking the Sun to task each time it leads with a non-New York story, because it seems to happen every other day. Of course, the Sun clearly thinks that its motto "because every issue revolves around New York" implicitly means "anything involving China." Today's lead story, "Bush Senior Snubs Son in a Speech to Chinese," at least gets extra points from Smarternysun for not using "Red China" in a headline — but that's all the slack it gets.

The piece, by "Special to the Sun" Joshua Gerstein, reports on a speech given by President Bush, Sr. at a BusinessWeek-sponsored event in Tianjin, China. As the subhead tells us, "Former President all but Apologizes for Steel Quotas," the key terms here being "all but." Bush says such things as "sometimes there are decisions that go beyond [free and fair trade]" and "nobody is pure in the trade business. Nobody is a total virgin"; these sound like justifications to us, not anti-steel-quota snubs. In any case, the issue is clearly open to broad interpretation, though that doesn't seem matter to the Sun. The article goes on to discount Bush's claims that China's economy is growing and that it's human rights record is improving — in fact, the jump has nothing at all to do with the headline. Which leads us, as readers, to wonder what the point of the piece is in the first place — it's a bit of a dog-bites-man story, from the descendant of the paper that gave birth to that little bon mot, nonetheless. The speech was given by a private citizen at a private dinner. Former presidents give speeches all the time. What gives? Oh right — Seth Lipsky doesn't like China. How could we have forgotten?

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Today's Rachel Kovner contribution, "Kerrey Tangling with New School Profs," on the other hand, isn't so much overly biased as underreported. The article discusses internecine conflict at the New School University between President (and former senator) John Kerrey, who has put forth an austere budget aimed at righting the school's fiscal ship, and the professorship, which fears the implied cuts will cost the faculty dearly. But while Kovner obviously spent some shoe leather (or cell phone minutes) getting quotes from both sides, she fails to get at the underlying causes of the current squabbles. The story follows by only a few days a very similar — and, frankly, much better — article in the Times. According to New School insiders, one of the major beefs the university's employees have with their president is his detachment from the school's day-to-day operations, and they accuse him of using the post as a holding bin for a 2004 Oval Office bid. Nor does she identify why, exactly, the university is suffering fiscal problems. Kovner implies that they're just par for the course at a university "famous for its liberal politics." But the problems derive more from the school's reliance on continuing education and commuter students; both groups canceled enrollments en masse after Sept. 11, creating an immediate and unexpected financial shortfall. Of course, analysis at that level might go beyond rehashing press releases and calling a few offices. It might require actual reporting.