The Silence of the Libs

The Times Blunders In

The New York Times of May 17th, 2011 included an article by Times stalwart Jim Dwyer. The breaking news was all about an allegation that the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, had sexually assaulted an African-immigrant hotel housekeeper in his suite at the Sofitel Hotel in Manhattan. Mr. Dwyer's article was titled “Hotel Keycard of I.M.F. Chief May Tell a Tale.” The article opened with these words:

Under siege by thieves who regularly got their hands on old-fashioned room keys, hotels in New York began using electronic locks on their doors in 1977, led by the fabled, fusty Algonquin. The new keys would be plastic, with a magnetic strip swiped through a card reader on the door. They would leave an electronic trail, stamped with the times that a door opened, closed or was ajar.

This sounds so conclusive, so “scientific.” In truth, the early years of electronic guestroom security were a muddle. Perforated-cardkey locksets were mounted in some of the world's most renowned hotels and lingered on guestroom doors well past 1985 – more than eight years beyond the date when Dwyer asserts that magnetic-strip cardkeys were universal. Addressing the attack on the housekeeper, Jim Dwyer quotes Peter Krauss, the chief of sales and marketing for Plasticard Locktech International of Asheville, NC., which cranks out cardkeys for hotels, who said “With a Sofitel, their standards would dictate the door was either open, or at a minimum, ajar, when the housekeeper is in the guestroom.” He added that this was the procedure in virtually all hotels.

Suddenly, afterdecades of stony silence, the New York Times had something to say about guestroom electronic locks and it was nothing but praise. The truth is more complex – and nasty. I had written letters of alarm to the New York TimesTimes about an assault on a guest in a Manhattan hotel by a random intruder. Not once did the New York Times print any of my warnings or contact me for further information, even though I had been the in-house locksmith for the world's most famous hotel in the heart of Manhattan. Here's the back story.

When I was Invisible

Way back in the early 1970s I was immersed in electronics technology; my hours were filled with Kirchoff's Laws, node analysis and electron ballistics. At the end of a delightful course in advanced calculus my instructor announced, “You can forget all this math; you will never use it again.” Saddened to hear this, I transferred to Parsons School of Design to study architectural and industrial design. I wanted to put physics and mathematics to use making stuff.

By the early 80s I was toying with the idea of moving away from Manhattan to a rural setting where my education would be of little use. I needed a trade. I was already a skilled wood worker, but I didn't want to be a carpenter. I chose instead to become a locksmith.

I recalled those little ads for the Foley Belsaw correspondence school in the back of Field and Stream magazine. I signed up, took the course and graduated. They gave me a diploma. After that, I took a second correspondence course and became a graduate of the Locksmith Institute of Little Falls, NJ. They sent me another diploma.

Desiring to know more, I enrolled at the bricks-and-mortar National School of Locksmithing, then located at 42nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan, for 300 hours of instruction in lock and safe work. I graduated second in my class. After graduation I received a license to practice locksmithing from the New York City Bureau of Consumer Affairs. I was subjected to a criminal background investigation; I was fingerprinted.

Soon thereafter, The Hotel contacted the National School of Locksmithing and requested a candidate for an open position. The school recommended me.

[Sidebar: I am restrained by concerns for the safety of guests at “The Hotel,” so I cannot reveal its world-renowned and instantly-recognizable name. My purpose here is to reveal a true history of greed, ineptitude and moral depravity without triggering a stampede of criminals to the hallways of Manhattan hotels. That would only inflict more harm on the unsuspecting visitors to New York City.]

I was interviewed by the hotel's management and sent to sit for a polygraph (lie detector) examination. After that, I was hired.

As one of the hotel's two locksmiths, I was attached to the hotel's security department, which was composed of two locksmiths and a bunch of former New York City police detectives. I wore a navy-blue uniform with the hotel's name embroidered on the shirt pocket. When I wore that uniform I became invisible; I was part of “the help;” wealthy guests at The Hotel simply assumed that I was there to serve them (which I was) and that I was not too bright. In that state of mind the wealthy and accomplished patrons of The Hotel would say and do things in my presence that they would never want described in print. I had free run of The Hotel; few of its precincts were closed to me. I was their locksmith; every security device in The Hotel was transparent to me; I could walk through walls; I was Houdini.

The Lock

The Hotel was an elegant lady and a museum of security devices that included everything from quaint warded mortise locks to a device that The Corporation, which owned The Hotel, hoped would sweep aside all other guestroom locksets and become the number one choice of hotels everywhere. I will call this contraption The Lock.

It was so new that no locksmithing school offered instruction on its installation and maintenance. I was trained by the resident locksmith of The Hotel and by the itinerant servicemen of The Lock's manufacturer who were constantly making the rounds of all the Manhattan hotels that had installed The Lock on their guestroom doors. At that time there were three versions of The Lock and all of them were fatally flawed. There were about two thousand of these locksets in The Hotel; it was the chosen guestroom lockset in several other up-scale Manhattan hotels. Thousands of visitors to Manhattan depended upon it for their personal safety.

[Sidebar: Henceforth I will be quoting generously from my book Case Studies in Dangerous Design, the whistle blow that got me fired as locksmith for The Hotel. This book was only available to members of the security community: locksmiths, security professionals and national intelligence agencies. I have redacted the names of the hotel, its parent corporation and the brand name of the hideously unreliable lockset that failed so many victims of hotel rapes, robberies and murders.]

From page two of Case Studies in Dangerous Design:

My position as a security professional is simple and absolute: some things must be well designed and thoroughly tested before they are marketed. To install an unproven and inadequate security device on a guestroom door is to indulge in a dangerous form of interior decorating the [Lock] is being used as a public relations artifact, as a tool for glamorizing hotels.
The proper attitude comes from seeing a physical-security mechanism for the life-sustaining machine that it is, not unlike a piece of medical equipment. The hotel environment is alive with criminal activity. Every hotel's security perimeter is under constant pressure. Criminals walk the hallways turning one doorknob after another, searching for a lockset failure. Only adequate security devices can isolate the guest population from this ceaseless predation.
Because a hotel's management is well aware of the criminal activity that goes on under their roof, the management is that much more liable for introducing anything less than the best security into its hotel. As predictable dangers increase, so does the responsibility of the security provider: the hospitality industry.

From the moment I published those words the hospitality industry was on notice.

The Fatal Flaw

What made The Lock so dangerous was its unpredictability. It was freakishly inconsistent. In Case Studies in Dangerous Design I explained in detail the idiosyncrasies of each version of The Lock. Here is my description of the most common guestroom lockset then in The Hotel and several other top-tier Manhattan hotels:

In another [Lock] design, the energized coil acts as an electro-magnet to lift a thick pin of ferrous metal against the force of gravity. When this pin has been lifted clear of a notch in the hub that is rigidly attached to the knob spindle, the knob and spindle can be turned and the latch bolt retracted. After an interval of about six seconds the coil is de-energized and the force of gravity causes the pin to drop back into the notch and once again prevent the knob from being rotated.
That's how [The Lock] should work. The truth is that an alarmingly high percentage of [Lock] mechanisms fail to complete this cycle successfully and therein lies the [Lock's] fatal flaw. Both [Lock] designs described here are subject to performance failures, but this second design is especially susceptible to malfunctions.
All too often, this is what happens:
One: The solenoid coil is energized and the guard pin is lifted free of the notch in the hub on the knob spindle. Two: The guest turns the knob and enters his (her) guestroom. Three: The solenoid coil de-energizes after six seconds, but the guard pin remains hung up in its cavity in the solenoid coil. It does not drop back down into the notch in the hub. Four: The hydraulic door closer closes the door behind the guest with a reassuring click as the latch bolt snaps into its pocket in the strike plate. The guest mistakenly believes that he (she) is safe and secure inside the room. In fact, anyone can now intrude upon the guest simply by turning the doorknob, for the [Lock] is now jammed in a permanently open configuration.

Repeated duty cycles in which the energizing of an electro-magnet was used to lift the iron guard pin was magnetizing the pin. When the pin itself had become a strong enough magnet, it would remain magnetically attached to the iron frame of the solenoid (coil) assembly at the top of its travel. This would leave the door unlocked. The guest would never suspect that anything is amiss. He would leave his room temporarily in the belief that his valuables were safe, only to return and find them stolen. Worse yet, the guest could be confronted by a hostile intruder.

I observed that

Hotel criminals are arch opportunists; they are always testing the hotel's security perimeter. When a weakness is found it is exploited at once. In a poll of prison inmates, sixty percent of those convicted of hotel crimes said that their principal method of operation was simply to dress up like a hotel guest and then roam the hallways twisting one doorknob after another.

Then I cautioned:

It is, of course, vitally important that someone familiar with the [Lock] mechanism be summoned to every crime scene where there is a [Lock] on the door. Only then can the truth of how an intruder gained entry to the room be firmly established.

After a guestroom crime on hotel property, the hotel has an enormous financial incentive to swap a defective guestroom lockset for one that is working perfectly and to do it in a hurry, before the detectives arrive. The public disclosure that the victim's guestroom lock had spontaneously unlocked itself would cost the hotel millions of dollars.

The Sound of Death Knocking

Worse yet, The Lock could be “bumped” open in one second with a two-dollar mallet. The only thing that prevented door-knob rotation was that iron guard pin sitting passively in a notch on the knob spindle. If that pin could be lifted a mere .175 inches, even for an instant, then the door knob could be snapped over and the guestroom penetrated. To accomplish this it was only necessary to strike The Lock sharply from below with a mallet held in one hand and then snap the doorknob over with the other hand when the guard pin had jumped clear of the notch in the spindle hub. It required a little practice to coordinate the two movements, but no extraordinary skill. To those who had acquired the skill, The Lock presented no more of an obstacle than a cheap padlock, which can also be rapped open.

Easy Pickings

As though a lock that would surreptitiously unlock itself and that could be bumped open with a cheap mallet weren't horrible enough, the manufacturer of The Lock made it preposterously easy to “pick” open. No lock picks or special skills were required – only three D-cells and a few inches of 20 gauge wire.

The most common version of The Lock had a hole already drilled through its case just one inch away from the solenoid contacts. This hole was at the bottom of the case. As it came from the factory this hole was plugged with a brass pin that extended upward inside the case to make contact with the printed circuit board, making the board electrically common with the case. A metal plate spanned the width of the case and included an eyelet that received the tip of the brass pin.

The first step in picking The Lock was to place the end of a pin punch against the bottom end of the brass pin and, with a single blow, drive the brass pin up and out of the way.

Next, introduce the bare ends of two strands of 20-gauge wire into the hole. If the insulated strands have been twisted together and the bare ends bent to the left, then things should go smoothly. The eyelet helps to guide the wires toward the contacts. When the wire leads, which are energized by three D-cells wired in series, finally touch the solenoid contacts a “click!” will clearly announce that the knob can be turned.

Counterfeit Keys in a Minute

Making matters worse, the first great wave of electronic locks used perforated cardkeys; all the key's data was encoded as holes in the plastic cardkey. Anyone with a pencil, a paper punch and a pair of scissors could fashion a working cardkey from a scrap of cardboard. All any criminal required was access to the guest's key for as long as it took to mark the key's pattern onto the cardboard. The pattern could be punched out later. If cardboard was not available, the pattern could be traced onto a napkin and transferred to cardboard later. The shape of the holes was not important and their size was not too critical.

The salesmen for The Lock were actually telling potential buyers that The Lock offered “the highest possible security.” During my employment at The Hotel the upper management refused to allow this contraption on their doors. They all knew that The Lock was a temperamental headache that was always threatening unpredictable lockouts. The general manager of The Hotel had a 100% mechanical Medeco cylinder mounted on the door of his suite. On page 30 of Case Studies I addressed the frustration of The Hotel's upper management:

The only people to escape are those with clout and craft. Ranking resident members of [The Hotel's] management have specifically requested that [The Lock] not be put on their doors; they prefer the convenience, reliability and superior protection provided by conventional metal pin-tumbler cylinders. The door to the security office is secured with a push-button combination lock that is purely mechanical in design. The locksmith shop, which contains much sensitive material, is secured with conventional metal cylinders.

Who Are These Guys?

The training of The Lock's servicing personnel should have been the subject of considerable concern. I never met even one of these service guys who had any locksmith training. They were not locksmiths. Even though they were intimately involved in the most sensitive security affairs of several high-end New York City hotels, not one of those I met could qualify for the locksmith license that was required by New York City law to do what they were doing. These young electronics-school grads were operating as unlicensed locksmiths, which was flagrantly illegal. They were solder jockeys, not security professionals. The training, competence and moral character of security-system servicemen should be the subject of intense concern to hotel managements, to the police, to city government and to the public. In reality, it was flagrantly ignored.

In New York, and other cities, it is against the law for anyone other than a licensed locksmith to service lock mechanisms. Applicants for a locksmith's license must demonstrate or document their competence to the Department of Consumer Affairs. Applicants are fingerprinted and photographed; they are subjected to background investigations by the police. No person having a prior felony conviction is permitted to hold a locksmith's license.

Licensing establishes a system of accountability. Complaints of misconduct or incompetence are investigated. Licenses must be renewed periodically and can be denied for cause. Without independent supervision the manufacturer of The Lock was at liberty to hire anyone and then turn him loose in hotels with sets of master keys. What were their standards for employment? Frankly, beyond a willingness to do boring work for low wages, there didn't seem to be any standards. Who were they? What were they doing before electronics school?

My most memorable traveling serviceman for The Lock was a young African-American electronics-school dropout who couldn't pronounce the words “mortise lock.” He knew no more about locks or proper security standards than did the average person on any Manhattan street corner. And yet, he was free to roam the halls of five of Manhattan's top-tier hotels. Meanwhile, The Hotel was explicitly advertising the security of its guestrooms as an inducement to come and spend the night.

My Conversation with the FBI

I shared locksmithing duties at The Hotel with a smart and capable locksmith named Mr. Wong. He had been grappling with all of the failings of The Lock long before I arrived; he schooled me in all of its idiosyncrasies. We would become commiserating comrades in our struggle to keep a constantly-degrading population of over 2,000 poorly-designed electronic locksets from causing The Hotel embarrassment.

We shared the hours from 9 to 5 and alternated shifts in the evening from 5 until 9 p.m. These evening hours were less eventful; I was “on call” like a fireman and waiting for an alarm – a call from the security office that another electronic lockset was misbehaving. When a call came, I grabbed my bag of tools and a working version of The Lock and headed out for another encounter with another unhappy hotel guest.

In the quiet times I read books and taught myself to juggle. Finally, my attention turned to the hideous device that was making my working hours such a pain. That's when I began writing Case Studies in Dangerous Design; that's when I began bringing a camera to the locksmith shop at night to document just how idiotic and menacing the design of this lock was. It had no business being in any hotel environment; it had been rushed onto the market prematurely to capture a market share before the impending introduction of a superior electronic lockset from Japan.

My rough manuscript was about an inch thick and included many first-hand accounts of hotel employees and guests who had run afoul of The Lock. This manuscript was literally worth more than its weight in gold. I was in a unique position to evaluate The Lock. I was a graduate of three locksmithing schools with an electronics background who had majored in industrial design. I was one of the very few locksmiths who had babysat a population of over 2,000 of these locksets. An independent engineering auditor would have charged the reckless creators of The Lock $60,000 for such an audit – complete with statistics about the lock population's rate of decay.

Did they appreciate my efforts to save their stupid asses? Apparently not. They panicked and resorted to intimidation tactics. A call came from the security office: I had two visitors from the FBI.

We met alone, just the three of us. They were courteous and all business. I told them everything: how the management and security staff of The Hotel knew that The Lock was an outrageously dangerous piece of junk; how The Lock could silently unlock itself, exposing hotel guests to intruder attacks. I made a special point of reminding them that every president of the United States (except Jimmy Carter) had been a guest at The Hotel. I told them of the service call that sent me rushing upstairs to replace the guestroom lockset on the door of President Reagan's chosen suite. This particular lock swap was executed under the watchful eyes of Secret Service agents. (There was a flurry of startled footwork when I reached into my canvas bag and abruptly pulled out that metal box stuffed with electronic components. It was every agent's vision of a bomb.) These same agents cooped together in a nearby suite. They couldn't be bothered with using a cardkey, so they extended the deadbolt to keep their door ajar. The constant battering of that deadbolt against the door frame rendered their door lock useless: its tiny brain had been clubbed into unconsciousness.

I told the FBI that everything I had written was true; I explained that they had been sent to interrogate me because the maker of The Lock hoped that I would be intimidated. I reminded them that our court system was the proper place for the maker of The Lock to call me to account. I stated point blank that the jerks who were promoting this life-threatening lockset would never sue me because they were terrified of giving me the power of discovery – the power to subpoena every record of every locksmith call to every ailing Lock in every hotel on the planet. I would be empowered to demand that they offer up the entire design and development history of The Lock, including the minutes of every one of their executive meetings. This they would never do.

The two courteous FBI agents asked me what I intended to do next. I answered that I intended to publish my manuscript. We shook hands and parted company. I never heard from the FBI again. My best guess is that they concluded that the best venue for resolving this brewing scandal was a courtroom.

The Silence of the Libs

I was, of course, fired from The Hotel. I turned in my blue uniform – my cloak of invisibility – and became, once again, a visible human.

A tightly edited version of Case Studies in Dangerous Design enjoyed brisk sales within the security community – locksmiths, crime-scene investigators, insurance carriers, security specialists, and government operatives, some of them foreign. Who wouldn't want to know how to kidnap a visiting Saudi prince from his bathtub in fewer than twenty seconds?

My life took a turn for the better and I returned to working as a commercial artist for architects and real estate developers. In the ensuing years I scanned the daily editions of the New York Times – seven days a week. Now and again there would appear articles about guests at The Hotel who had been battered, robbed or raped by an intruder. In every one of these New York Times articles The Hotel feigned innocence and pointed an accusing finger straight at the victim who, they asserted must have allowed her attacker entry due to the guest's negligence. Not one of these battered men or savagely raped women had a clue that the lockset on their guestroom door might have secretly unlocked itself!

Who would even imagine such a thing? Did you ever see a padlock pop open all by itself? Did your gym locker ever open all by itself? Of course not! Weird events like these simply don't happen; they defy our shared experience. Security devices simply don't unlock themselves. Right?

Well, dear reader, that's exactly what The Lock was doing. The buildup of residual magnetism in the lock's guard pin would cause it to cling to the metal roof of its solenoid chamber and not fall back down to its locking position. The cynical bastards who created The Lock had designed the world's first totally unpredictable self-unlocking lock. For this they should have been put on trial. So should their accessories-after-the-fact at The New York Times.

Instead, there was a sweeping cover up by all of the co-mingled and overlapping commercial interests that had a stake in keeping The Lock's hideous failings a dark secret.

The maker of The Lock was desperate to keep the secret; the parent corporation of The Hotel also had a stake in The Lock's success; The Hotel had a financial interest in keeping The Lock's fatal flaws hidden from every victim of every guestroom crime. All three of these commercial interests conspired to keep the compensation to guestroom victims to a minimum.

To these conspirators I now add a fourth: The New York Times, its editors and its entire upper management, not excluding Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. In the ensuing years articles have appeared in the New York Times describing horrific attacks against guests in Manhattan hotel guestrooms. In each case the hotel stated or intimated that any breach of guestroom security was the fault of the guest.

After the appearance of each of these article I rushed off a letter to the New York Times offering deeper insight into the crime scene based on my first-hand real-life experiences. Not once were any of my detailed first-hand eyewitness accounts of security failures at The Hotel published in The New York Times; not once did anyone at the Times call me or express any curiosity about what amounted to a nation-wide rape-and-battery holocaust against blameless guests in America's most posh hotels.

This scandal should have captured headlines around the world, but it didn't. It was suppressed by the management of The New York Times who cynically left millions of travelers vulnerable to rape, murder and robbery.

Why would the New York Times turn its back on this explosive revelation? It had all the elements they crave: greedy businessmen, slipshod product design, reckless ineptitude and false advertising. The New York Times should have been all over these greedy heartless Fat Cats, and yet . . . the “newspaper of record” remained as still as stone. What accounted for The Silence of the Libs?

The obvious answer is on display in every Sunday edition of the New York Times. There is an entire section of the Times that is dedicated to never criticizing hotel guestroom security – it's called the Travel Section.

The New York Times doesn't prosper by telling the truth; it prospers by selling its page space to corporations that prosper from persuading us to buy their stuff, whatever it is. Everything from push-up bras to luxury vacations is what keeps Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. living his lavish lifestyle. For Arthur to bite the hand of the hotel-chain mega-corporations would be tantamount to financial suicide and this particular pudgy Manhattan metro-sexual isn't about to take a vow of poverty.

Once I understood that the New York Times and the big corporations that were harming hotel guests all over the world were, in fact, co-dependent, I abandoned all hope that I could spark an investigation of the ironically-named “hospitality industry.”

The smooth-talking, perfectly-moisturized and ever urbane publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., just plunked down $3.9 million for a penthouse in The Dorilton, a brick-and-limestone dowager on the corner of 71st Street and Broadway, in Manhattan. He couldn't have managed the asking price without those hotel-chain revenues. He will never bite the hand that feeds his bloated lifestyle. In this respect, he is exactly like his late father, who was publisher of the New York Times during the first experimental transition to electronic guestroom security devices. Back then, almost every guest at a Manhattan hotel was a security-device guinea pig.

All of my best efforts to contact the victims of these hotel crimes were futile. I even sent a fat information package to the police department in the village of an English woman with the message that they should notify her that her sexual assault in The Hotel was not her fault. I never heard back from anyone. All the victims had settled. They had all been hoodwinked into believing that they could not mount a plausible case against the majestic hotels. The victims had no evidence that their guestroom security had been sub-standard. By the time the victims had received my insightful explanations of what had really allowed their guestrooms to be invaded, the hotel managements had already paid the victims some undisclosed compensation and the victims had already signed non-disclosure agreements with the hotels. These victims were owed millions of dollars; they had settled for a comparative pittance because the maker of The Lock, several greedy hotel chains and the money-hungry “newspaper of record” had colluded to conceal the truth.

Where We are Now

Now the former boss of the International Monetary Fund is going on trial for a hotel guestroom crime. The whole world is watching. The New York Times would have us believe that electronic locksets are flawless historians of every guestroom coming and going. Nothing in the trashy history of electronic locks supports the bluster of the New York Times. The Times repeatedly turned a deaf ear to my alarms about the growing epidemic of guestroom rapes and murders. The silence of the Times left countless victims of hotel crimes uninformed and under-compensated. All the while the Arthur Sulzbergers, senior and junior, were insulating themselves from the pain of the world with booty from the very same industry that they were protecting from exposure.

The Times is currently spinning a Beauty and the Beast fantasy starring Dominique Strauss-Kahn as The Beast and the ever-anonymous Little African- Immigrant Mom as the radiant vision of vulnerable Muslim piety. Never mind that, according to the Times' own telling of her journey to New York she probably lied her way into America. Something like the truth will be pounded out in a court of law.

If Strauss-Kahn is found guilty then we can expect the Rev. Al Sharpton to swoop in to offer the sainted housekeeper a multi-million-dollar payday, just as he did in 1999 when her fellow countryman, Amadou Diallo, was shot while resisting arrest. Diallo had lied his way into America with a bogus tale of political oppression. After Diallo's death, Sharpton won a super payoff for all of Diallo's kinsmen whom Diallo had sworn to our immigration authorities had been slaughtered in faraway political conflicts in his native Guinea.

In its gush piece titled “From Hut in Africa to the Glare Of a High Profile Assault Case” (NY Times, 6/15/11, p.1), the Times included a photo of a street mural in the Bronx memorializing Amadou Diallo without mentioning Diallo's fraudulent immigration. Their message: all immigrants are victims.

The New York Times has clearly taken sides; they are grasping for any bit of evidence that Strauss-Kahn conforms to their ideological stereotype of the Rich White Male Ogre. The last time the idiot scribblers at the New York Times were this sure of themselves was during the Hideous Duke Rape Hoax, when the staff and management of the “newspaper of record” went all-out in their rush to convince us that a crazy, lying, drug-addled black prostitute was really just a struggling student and a sainted mom who had been gang raped by a bunch of privileged whiteboy louts.

Every word of her accusations was proven false by photographic evidence, by flawless forensic evidence, by digital recordings and by impartial third-party witnesses. After that, the New York Times had a lot of embarrassing apologizing to do. The newspaper that had soft-peddled the Nazi extermination of the Jews during World War Two and that concealed Stalin's deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s was once again choosing sides and falsifying the historical record.

The Times is repeating its previous moral failings. These liberals cannot help themselves; they are animated by impulses more primitive than logic. They want to feel good about themselves and for them that means hating those people whom they have typecast as hate-worthy. They have too much of an emotional investment in seeing the world in their peculiar way to be reliable observers of reality. Their demonstrated reluctance to investigate their hospitality-industry advertisers, even as these advertisers were concealing their liability in cases of felony rape and murder, is chilling. Given a choice between telling the truth and fattening their bank accounts, the self-satisfied liberals at the New York Times chose self-enrichment every single time.