The NYT has spent the last 45 years cheerleading the rise of the real estate lobbies that have eviscerated much of the city’s cultural force. Now that Manhattan’s become a Disney backdrop for money laundering and tourism (if the two should even be distinguished), the paper is scrabbling around for new angles on the catastrophe. A few days ago it was REAL ESTATE IS TOTALLY BOUNCING BACK UNLESS YOU ACTUALLY READ THE STORY. Today, in a city of nearly 9 million people, they found two(!!!) heartwarming tales. They could have found countless more small property owners who fantastic, but no amount of them could obscure the unstated premise that makes this article so hilarious: that the overwhelming majority of landlords are structural *ssholes. And when you strip away that context — which the NYT can’t actually say out loud, of course — the result is the purest propaganda. If you’re looking for today’s equivalent of totalitarian rubbish about some mythical heroic citizen who sacrificed for the good of the factory / people / nation / state, this is it.