Thanks to Felix Salmon for quoting me in his take-down of this embarrassing NYT piece on Craig Pirrong and Scott Irwin, two well-known economists who study commodity-market speculation. Basically, the reporter dislikes speculation (which he clearly doesn't understand), so he assumes any expert with a different view must be a hired gun for various commodity-market firms and groups. The result is a preposterous article riddled with "jaw-on-the-floor" errors, mendaciously edited so the unfounded accusations come first, and the self-contradictions revealed only at the end of the piece. (E.g., the professors are paid consultants for these groups — oh, but they say the opposite of what these groups want, and are actually paid to work on entirely different things.)
As one commentator on my blog described it: "NYT reporter dutifully caters to its dwindling readership’s biases in an attempt to sell newspapers."
