Steve Cuozzo writes in today’s New York Post:

There they go again at The New York Times — trashing “corporate welfare” in the form of tax breaks for companies that pledge to keep or create jobs in the city. It’s an axe they’re entitled to grind, even in stories that are supposed to report news rather than disseminate propaganda. But a Times piece yesterday, like so many before, neglected to mention how the bleeding “paper of record” has itself so lavishly and greedily benefitted from “corporate welfare.”
Pfizer Inc. plans to move up to 1,400 employees out of town. As a result, the Times reported, it may have to reimburse the city for $12 million in tax breaks of which it availed itself since 2003, when it received a theoretical $47 million in city and state incentives in exchange for committing to expand its workforce here.
The Times called the company’s change of heart an “embarrassment” for Mayor Bloomberg and state officials. The story’s thrust was to assail the whole concept of tax credits and other benefits given to large employers. “Some economists,” we read, assert that “scarce” public resources “could be better spent on transportation, education and other things that create a better environment for all employers.”
Now, not every instance of job-retention benefits makes sense, and each case is open to question. Lots of companies have received such benefits without controversy — including The Post’s parent, News Corp., which got a modest tax break to build a new printing plant in The Bronx. It’s harder to justify the $650 million the city and state spotted Goldman Sachs in 2005 to put up a new headquarters in Battery Park City, even after it was clear that Goldman had no other alternative.
But what’s outrageous is how the Times, in its predictable and repetitive campaign opposing “corporate welfare,” invariably omits any reference to the public largesse the newspaper company enjoyed in the construction of its own Eighth Avenue headquarters.
Lest anyone forget, the Times Co. and its development partner, Bruce Ratner, received $26.1 million in city tax breaks — more than twice the amount Pfizer actually accepted — for the tower project.
But even that number doesn’t begin to reflect what the Times really got from Albany and City Hall. The Times Co. and Ratner were only able to build an admittedly fine skyscraper thanks to the bulldozer of eminent domain — the state’s highly controversial, and rarely applied, condemnation power.

The rest here.