Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

There is something wrong at the New York Times

From the paper’s presidential polling to noncoverage of Trump’s stumbles, things aren’t adding up at the Gray Lady

By LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
Columnist
PUBLISHED MARCH 5, 2024 9:01AM (EST)

(Salon) 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.

....(snip)....

The truly incredible thing is that the New York Times provides the evidence that would cause any other reasonable journalistic enterprise to question the accuracy of its own poll. The poll shows that Trump still has the support of nearly every Republican who voted for him in 2020 – this in the face of the fact that between 30 and 40 percent of primary voters have chosen another candidate than Trump.

Those people are not poll respondents. They’re voters. The Times/Siena poll also somehow comes up with 12 percent support among Democrats for Dean Phillips, who has yet to get more than two percent of the vote in a primary. Even Phillips himself put out a tweet that said “When the NYT/Siena poll shows me at 12%, you better believe it’s flawed. Only 5% even know who I am.” The poll also shows that among respondents who described themselves as unhappy with both candidates, they favor Biden over Trump by 12 points. So, Biden has the utterly disaffected vote and carries independents by four points, and he’s losing to Trump by four points? ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/03/05/there-is-something-at-the-new-york-times/