Most Americans think Trump committed serious crimes. The New York Times says that's good news for Trump.

The Times is lying to you about its own poll.

This is the headline on a New York Times article published today:

The article is about a single question the New York Times/Siena poll asked in December and again in February: “Do you think that Donald Trump has or has not committed any serious federal crimes?”

For more than 1,100 words, the Times portrayed the findings as good news for Trump, from the headline to the statement that “voters across the political spectrum are now less likely to say that Mr. Trump acted criminally” to “Mr. Trump’s team … are less concerned that the specifics in the case will hurt him with voters, who they think have become inured to reports about his personal behavior” to quoting two poll respondents, both of whom said they did not think Trump has committed crimes.

Here’s what the Times left out: In both polls, a majority of Americans said they thought Trump committed serious crimes. In December, 58 percent of registered voters said Trump committed serious crimes, while only 33 percent said he did not. In February, 53 percent said Trump committed serious crimes, while only 36 percent said he did not.¹ The Times never mentioned any of that.²

That’s right: In an article entirely about a poll question asking if people think Trump committed serious crimes, the New York Times never once told readers that most people think he did commit serious crimes. It instead portrayed the poll finding as good news for Trump, and quoted only respondents who said he did not commit crimes.

The baseline quality you should insist on from the news companies you pay — with money, and with your attention — is honesty. And it is simply not honest to run an article about the results of a poll question asking whether people think Trump committed crimes that omits the fact that a majority think he did, and portrays the poll results as good news for Trump.

I’ll repeat here an offer I made on Twitter:

I’m confident no New York Times employee will take me up on this, because it is simply indefensible. Nobody will actually defend what the Times did today; it would be humiliating to do so. But the Times will keep doing things like this. They’re fundamentally committed to portraying their polls as good news for Trump and bad news for Biden.

Last year I noted that a Times article headlined “Why Trump Seems Less Vulnerable on Abortion Than Other Republicans” omitted the fact that in the Times poll the article was based on, Trump trailed Joe Biden by nine points on the question of which candidate people trust to do a better job on abortion. When the Times poll yields a bad result for Trump, the Times often spins it as good news for him. And when it yields a bad result for Biden, the paper relentlessly hypes the poll: 51 articles in 5 days about a single poll, for example.

This kind of media coverage has an effect on the public’s perception of the candidates — and thus on the race for the White House. When the Times hypes voter concerns about, for example, Biden’s age, it gives itself (and other news companies) an excuse to make Biden’s age a primary focus of its campaign coverage, increasing the salience of the topic for voters and hurting Biden.

Conversely, when the Times downplays the public’s belief that Trump has committed serious crimes (and even portrays polls that find a majority of the public think him guilty as good news for Trump) it gives itself (and other news companies) an excuse to de-emphasize Trump’s criminality in its coverage of the campaign — and that decreases the salience of Trump’s lawbreaking for voters and helps Trump.

1. Among likely voters the split was 59/34 in December and 53/38 in February.

2. Since the Times focused on the decrease in people saying Trump committed serious crimes, it is worth noting that the 5-point decrease (from 58 to 53) that serves as the Times’ entire basis for the article is negligible given the poll’s margin of error (4 points for the February poll and 3.5 points for the December poll.)