Might this not be a way to get people to accept the reality that the view of reality to which we have been exposed since birth is asymptotically approaching 100% phony, e.g. euphemism, puffery, imaginative vacuity and partial truths at best, paid-for praise, publicity, fraud, BS, deceit, whole cloth hokum and honey-fugling the norm, with every successful persona, product, purveyor and position diligently designed and manifested to be taken up by a specific audience, and to thrive among the myths already held dear by that audience? The NY Times is a media company that has reinvented itself to survive, dedicated to the proposition that survival is the sine qua non of meaning. The facts are not as important as the meaning, and the modern thoughtful reader, particularly the sophisticated reader of the NY Times, engages the text, imagining and constructing their own meaning. Facts are the new adverbs -- to be used cautiously and sparingly, more for distraction or inspiration than for navigation or inference.