They cover some political and recent-events stuff solidly (international topics much less so), but the domain-specific sucks well outside of agricultural policy. If ag policy and computer security and rock climbing are all poorly covered, I eventually have to assume they aren't doing any better on the topics I don't know.
(Where, of course, "terrible" and "better than most" are not contradictory.)
The truth is that this was published without because it is an issue that gets folks to read, making their job of selling newspapers easier.
My favorite example is the coverage of the Dawn Wall rock climb a few years back. It was 'news', but there was very little time pressure for coverage, there was (almost) no divisive/political aspect, and the technical aspects were easy to break down to lay-reader level. Plus, there were thousands of online guides and experts willing to clarify context and terminology for free. It should have been covered flawlessly, just because there was nothing standing in the way of that.
And instead, the results were shameful. There was no real harm done, but most of the articles were less accurate than a Simple English Wikipedia page would have been. It made for an interesting demonstration of how atrocious any form of expert-knowledge news is, even by sites like the NYT, even on uncontroversial topics.
http://appliedmythology.blogspot.com/
But I wonder what is "subtle anti-ag" or "blatantly pro-ag" means in this context. Can you give some examples?
Blatantly pro-ag: research funded by agribusiness or the USDA. Clearly intended to benefit the industry.
The NYT apples to oranges study on rate of yield increase in countries that don't use GMOs (lower starting point) to countries that do (higher starting point) over the same time really undermines their editorial credibility on these kinds of issues with people, like me, who actually deal with agriculture.