An equation, in case you didn’t know it, is the act of declaring two things to be equal or balanced—most often two mathematical propositions on either side of an equal sign. As applied to the media, I suppose “equation” might be used to suggest some kind of balancing or counter-balancing operation to correct for bias, if such a thing were ever to be possible in the media. But as used by The New York Times in “The Media Equation,” the rubric under which are published the musings of their new columnist Ben Smith, late of Buzzfeed, the word is perfectly meaningless. Ben or one of his editors must have decided that “equation” had a suitably scientific and highbrow ring to it and therefore was appropriate to describe the sacred mysteries of the journalistic craft, while also implying the mathematical precision that might be expected of Mr. Smith’s conclusions. In other words, it’s an unintentional joke—almost as good a joke as my favorite laugh-out-loud headline of the year to date, appended to one of Mr. Smith’s columns: “Trump Has Begun His Corona Campaign. We Don’t Have to Play Along,” which reserves its punch-line to the subhead: “The coronavirus story isn’t about the president.”

Well, if it isn’t “about” him, it’s not for lack of Mr. Smith’s and his Timescolleagues’ straining every sinew to make it about him and his failure to deal effectively with the crisis as, it sometimes seems, the media assume any proper president would have