Fox Butterfield (born 8 July 1939)[1] is an American journalist who spent much of his 30-year career[2] reporting for The New York Times.

Butterfield served as Times bureau chief in Saigon, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Boston and as a correspondent in Washington and New York City.

During that time, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize as a member of The New York Times team that published the Pentagon Papers, the Pentagon's secret history of the Vietnam War, in 1971 and won a 1983 National Book Award for Nonfiction for China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, an account of his experience as the first Times reporter allowed in China after the revolution.

Taranto coined the term after reading Butterfield's articles discussing the "paradox" of crime rates falling while the prison population grew due to tougher sentencing guidelines.

[11] Taranto and a Jewish World Review columnist, along with the conservative Weekly Standard, felt that Butterfield should have considered that the tougher sentencing guidelines might have reduced crime by causing more criminals to be in jail.