NYT spies a story; overlooks the facts.(Beat the Press: The hand that rules the press ... rules the country--Judge Learned Hand)(New York Times)

In Journalism 101, students learn to write newspaper stories in what's referred to as the Inverted Pyramid--with all the important, newsworthy information at the top, and the less relevant details relegated to the bottom. The technique is simple, logical and efficient--and ignored by many of today's reporter hotshots.

To make it big in the establishment media, many writers follow what could be called the Perverted Pyramid, which looks more like an hourglass. In this format, the reporter places the points that support his or her agenda up at the top of the story, some mind-numbing minutiae in the middle, and the key details that contradict his or her point of view way down at the bottom. Few readers are likely to make it to the inconvenient facts. Yet no one can claim the reporter didn't present both sides.

Lots of media outlets now regularly pervert the reporting pyramid, but few as expertly as the New York Times. And in its latest series of trademark overblown page-one stories designed to destroy the Bush Presidency--these revealing the U.S. National Security Agency's tapping of terrorist calls to and from the U.S.--the Gray Lady perverts the pyramid in grand style.

In the series' first article, the third paragraph tells us that the NSA program may have "stretched, if not crossed, Constitutional limits on legal searches." But it's not until paragraph 52 (out of 53 in this 3,633-word epic) that we learn that a federal court recognized "the President's inherent Constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance" back in 2002.

In other words: The feeling of someone at the New York Times that the program might be un-Constitutional gets top billing. The fact that the federal courts have explicitly said otherwise barely merits a mention deep in the story's nether regions.

But there's more to perverting the pyramid than the mere misordering of facts. Just as important is the omission of important details, and the use of loaded terminology.

That's why the Times informs us that the federal ruling focused on "an unrelated matter" while leaving out its court name (In re Sealed Case), then fails to mention any of the other federal cases--United States v. ...