Smartertimes.com

The New York Times has it coming.

Is there any publication more self-involved, more pompous, and more unable to admit its own mistakes? Those who followed the Wen Ho Lee debacle got a zesty taste of the Times' penchant for never saying "sorry," and any careful reader can spot the distinct and nasty taste of politics spattering select articles within its pages.

This said, it's still one of the most powerful, best written and most fascinating newspapers in print. In a sense, then, any good friend of the paper would criticize it, loudly and publicly, in the hope that it will continue to strive for the journalistic perfection its editors often seem to believe they've already acheived.

Smartertimes.com is exactly that friend, although the site clearly presents itself as an opposition voice, sans the "loyal" modifier.

On a daily basis, Editor Ira Stoll uses his cleanly designed website to publish daily critiques of New York Times articles. The site, which has been up since June 2000, is marvelous in its thoroughness, and its timeliness is refreshing in a medium famed for irregular updates.

An article in the New York Press says Stoll, 27, comes from a distinguished journalistic background — the Harvard grad was president of the Crimson, and managing editor of the Jewish weekly Forward. Along with former Forward editor-in-chief Seth Lipsky (who was pushed out for his conservative editorial slant) Stoll is looking into starting up a new conservative New York daily paper, something that Smartertimes.com actively champions.

Stoll is a clean, clear writer, and his short dispatches cut to the quick. He briefly introduces the piece he's going to criticize, sets up his problem with the article, and drives it home with a relevant counter-example or bon mot.

In his April 21 commentary on a Times article entitled "Desperate for Prison Guards, Some States Even Rob Cradles," Stoll writes: "You have to read pretty far into the article before a prison warden notes that 18-year olds can serve in the military. They can also vote. Keep an eye out for an upcoming front-page New York Times article under a headline like 'U.S. Army Even Robs Cradles.'"

In his April 4 commentary, he writes: "When some of the richest Americans took out an advertisement in the New York Times opposing the repeal of the death tax, the Times covered it with a news article on its front page.

Today's New York Times carries a full-page ad from African American business leaders who support the elimination of the death tax; the Times news columns have no coverage of it at all. Smartertimes.com doesn't think the Times should write a news article about every ad it runs, and it can see the man-bites-dog newsworthiness of rich people backing the death tax. But surely there's a similar man-bites-dog newsworthiness in the fact that these prominent blacks, members of one of the most loyal Democratic constituent groups, are siding with the Republicans on the death tax repeal."

Stoll may be nit-picky at times, going after the faintest whiff of liberal bias like a deranged, witty pit bull, but he often makes sense, and sometimes offers insights that would bother even the most staunchly loyal reader of the Times.

In defense of the Times: Stoll is sometimes as dogmatic and inflexible as the paper he criticizes. He makes no secret of his allegiance to the New York Post (a Rupert Murdoch publication that occasionally pays him for his insights, and takes a conservative stance in line with the drift of most of his criticism), and he needs to fill his website every day. This means he stretches the material presented to him, even if it's not terribly elastic.

But in a sense, smartertimes.com is doing exactly what the Web is made for.

The Web allows self-proclaimed pundits like Stoll to air their opinions in an organized and generally accessible way, bypassing the need for conventional media outlets. Would a regular paper or magazine let an unproven Stoll air daily gripes about the Times? No. But by presenting a coherent and consistent set of criticisms about a major media source, Stoll has managed to build a lively following for himself.

Of course, not everyone allows Internet gadflies the same sort of room to manuever. In the Ukraine, an Internet journalist named Heorhiy Gongadze used the Web to publish material incriminating various government officials for corruption. He vanished for a while. When he resurfaced, it was as a headless corpse. Outcry over this death, which has been directly linked to the Ukraine's president, Leonid Kuchma, has lead to street protests and the gelling of the country's democracy movement.

Fortunately, the editors at the Times seem to be more relaxed in their treatment of Stoll. This is good: The world always needs more educated skeptics, regardless of their political outlook. Smartertimes.com is a model for what a skeptical objector's website can look like, and if we're lucky, many imitators will spring up in its footsteps.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)