Watch as the one time "paper of record" slides down the hill into complete irrelevance

What editor signed off on this drivel?

Then, too, there was the unfortunate homonym at the heart of a commercial from Prudential Financial, titled “What Can a Rock Do?”

The problem with the spot, created internally at Prudential, was that whenever the announcer said, “a rock” — invoking the Prudential logo, the rock of Gibraltar — it sounded as if he were saying, yes, “Iraq.”

To be sure, sometimes “a rock” is just “a rock,” and someone who has watched the Super Bowl XIX years in a row only for the commercials may be inferring things that Madison Avenue never meant to imply.

Gee! Ya think?

I know that covering the advertising beat, even for a large newspaper like the NYT, can be like plumbing shallow waters, but come on! When the reporter has to reference his own anti-war bias to come up with some deadline copy? Better to have not even filed the story in the first place.

I googled around looking for an example of "good" coverage of the Super Bowl commercials, but couldn't find one. Here's this from the Miami Herald:

Otherwise, the ads were mostly forgettable. [...] A razor somehow causing a woman to fall off a treadmill in a gym, an ad I first thought must be for the Jackson Memorial Hospital emergency room but turned out to be for Schick.

Is this reporter unaware that the Schick ad has been in rotation for six months already? Maybe not in his zip-code, but if he's going to comment about it... wouldn't that be a handy thing to know?

I don't ask much from my ad beat reporters, just stop phoning it in, guys.