The Times Does Arithmetic

We have noted more than once that the New York Times’ Corrections section betrays, along with that paper’s extravagant political bias, an ignorance of history that would shame a competent high school student. The same ignorance extends to arithmetic. This item from today’s Corrections is one of a number of similar retractions that I’ve seen over the past year; oddly, the Times’ arithmetic mistakes always seem to exaggerate a liberal point:
“An article last Sunday about ways of evaluating job gains and employment misstated the percentage difference between an estimate of job growth cited by Treasury Secretary John W. Snow and an earlier estimate made by the Bush administration in 2002. Mr. Snow’s figure of 200,000 jobs per month was 33 percent lower than the administration’s figure of about 300,000, not 50 percent lower.”
Would someone please remind me why the Times’ reporters and editors are said to comprise an “elite”?