The Times, Late Again
Oh, there was more to the Columbia settlement?
I’m not comfortable blowing my own horn, but I am about to. Almost a week after my post about the disastrous Columbia University settlement with the government,[i] The New York Times discovered that the settlement contained unsettling provisions beyond the huge payment.[ii] The Times would have known that if reporters had read the entire 22-page settlement instead of what I assume to be reliance on the sanitized descriptions from Columbia and the administration.
This is the second time in a month the Post or Times followed blogs I wrote. The other was on the illegality of Trump’s tariffs.[iii] This is getting tiresome. I wish they would just do their jobs right so I would have to scrounge harder for material. This is waaay too easy—and disheartening.
Crock is an ink-stained wretch who toiled in the journalism fields for three decades for The Associated Press, The Palm Beach Post, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Investopedia, TheStreet.com, and beststory.ca. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, World Affairs Journal, and Northwestern Journal of International Affairs, and he has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Court TV, CNNfn, CSPAN, Fox News, and National Public Radio’s To the Point, On Point, and Here and Now.
Crock holds a B.A. in political science and a J.D. from Columbia (as John Belushi said in Animal House, “Seven years of college down the drain.”), and an M.S.J. from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. After the golden era of journalism ended for him circa 2005, he worked for several consulting firms as a writer, including Accenture, McKinsey, and Abt Global. He is mentoring local newspapers and joined The Resistance after he retired April 1, 2025.
[i] https://stancrock.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/169713117?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts
[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/nyregion/columbia-brown-admissions-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Keep it up, please, Stan! I’m not the only one who relies on you to hold the NYT and WAPO to the standards we deserve.