There is something wrong at the New York Times

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Two things…check that…three things appear to have gone off the rails at the paper we used to call the Gray Lady.  First, whoever is in charge of the paper’s polls is not doing their job.  Second, whoever is choosing what to emphasize in the Times coverage of the campaign for the presidency is showing bias.  Third, the Times is obsessed with Joe Biden’s age at the same time they’re leaving evidence of Donald Trump’s mental and verbal stumbles completely out of the news.

Let’s start right there.  At a rally on Saturday night in Virginia, Trump confused former president Obama, who left office seven years ago, with President Biden for the third time over the last six months.  “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said, as his crowd of rabid supporters suddenly fell silent. “You heard that. Nuclear. He’s starting to talk nuclear weapons today.”  You won’t find that verbal stumble and the crowd’s stunned reaction in the Times coverage of the campaign over the weekend.  You’ll have to subscribe to the online version of The Guardian if you want to learn how Trump is losing his way mid-sentence at rallies and just mumbling incoherently.

The Times on Sunday, however, had this headline ready for your morning coffee: “Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to be Effective.”  It’s another grab from the New York Times/Siena College poll they published on Saturday that is so outrageously flawed, a cottage industry has sprung up to pick apart its methodology and point out its glaring contradictions and straight-up bias. 

A favorite of poll skeptics, who include Simon Rosenberg at “Hopium Chronicles,” Jay Kuo at “The Status Kuo,” and the ever-indispensable Robert Hubbell at “Today’s Edition,” is its sampling bias.  How did the New York Times come up with a polling sample that included 36 percent rural voters when the 2020 percentage of voters who were rural was 19 percent?  Somehow, the poll’s sample of female voters was equally skewed.  The poll found Trump winning the female vote by one percent, when Biden carried women in 2020 by eleven points. The Times wants you to ignore that in between, all three of Trump’s Supreme Court justices quarterbacked the Dobbs decision overturning women’s constitutional right to abortion, followed almost immediately by states banning abortion all over the country, many with no exceptions for rape or incest.  The Times doesn’t say how it squares its poll numbers with the fact that women turned out in huge numbers to help win referendums confirming a right to abortion in states including such Republican strongholds as Kansas and Kentucky and handed every special election to Democratic Party candidates in the bargain.  They just want you to believe there’s been a twelve point swing by women toward Trump without any evidence except, poof!  It happened!

This is an excerpt from my weekly Salon column, published every Tuesday. To read the rest of the column, go here:

Something is wrong at the NYT