As Tom Blumer writes at BizzyBlog, “It seems that the answer to ‘How do we spin Christmas shopping season?’ at the New York Times depends on which party occupies the Oval Office in Washington.” Tom spots the New York Times reporting that “Americans are splurging as if it’s 2007.” But then going back through how the Gray Lady actually reported those numbers back then, he finds they weren’t exactly impressed by the Christmas retail figures in 2007…0r 2006, 0r 2005.
But then, the Gray Lady is large and definitely contains multiples; in addition to spinning the retail sales numbers depending upon which party occupies the Oval Office, the various sections of the Times compete with each other as to whether or not increased sales in toto are good or bad. The Times seems to run several “brave anti-consumerist iconoclastic Greenwich Village figure gives up toilet paper/indoor plumbing/electricity” stories each year in sharp contradistinction to all of the advertising the paper relies upon to keep the doors open. Plus what do the folks who write all of the environmentalist columns think about America’s Christmastime consumption?
(Presumably though, Thomas Friedman is pretty happy with the amount of manufacturing Santa outsources from the North Pole to China each year.)
Wonder what Friedman would think if the NYT outsourced the production of his fascinating column to China? Best of all, his readers would likely not notice, probably surmising that had already occurred a long time ago.