The word "damning" seems a bit strong. "Qualifying" might be better. The author, Richard Bernstein, concludes: in extrapolating from the experience of Ms. Ren

The word "damning" seems a bit strong. "Qualifying" might be better. The author, Richard Bernstein, concludes: in extrapolating from the experience of Ms. Ren to make assertions about that “vast majority,” the paper has put its tremendous prestige and power behind a demonstrably misleading depiction of the nail salon business as a whole. But what's his demonstrable evidence of institutional bias? As the upstanding "part owner of two day-spas in Manhattan", he's never seen anything like the practices described in the article? An equally broad extrapolation. Even his investigation into the phantom $10 / day ad seems a bit disingenuous. He can't find an ad quoting that rate and it does seem odd that a salon would advertise such a low rate when it could just list no rate at all, which Brownstein concedes the majority of ads do. But he seems to misconstrue the article's quote that "the rate was confirmed by several workers" to suggest that the Times' reporter was using the workers to confirm that such ads were all over the place when the reporter intended instead to confirm that this was a common rate in the industry (regardless of the ad). If it turned out the ad couldn't be substantiated, but the practices described in the article were accurate, it'd be worthy of a correction. But not a retraction. What we get with Richard Bernstein's article, one might hazard, is a "demonstrably misleading depiction" of the New York Times article from a motivated industry apologist that plugs its own anecdotes and loose figures into a narrative that seems to have its own populist agenda: the New York Times is not much better than HuffPo or Fox News when it comes to real journalism. Does that mean we should also give up on the New York Review of Books? I hope not.