Subject: Re: Trump's fascist tilt
A few years ago the New York Times decided they wanted to take down Real Clear Politics for some reasons - probably because they weren't toeing the line. Or something. RCP decided to finally respond:

https://www.realclearpolitics....

Ten days after the 2020 election, Tom Bevan, co-founder and president of RealClearPolitics, received an email from a New York Times reporter who covers the media. The reporter, Jeremy W. Peters, advised Bevan that his newspaper was working on a story about RCP and asked for responses to various questions and accusations. Four days later, Peters’ critique was published under the headline “A Popular Political Site Made a Sharp Right Turn. What Steered It.”

Yep. Can't have some part of the media straying from the flock. So what did the down-the-middle NYT say?

The sleight-of-hand was right there in the headline. The New York Times simply declared that RCP “made a sharp right turn,” and suggested it will document how this happened.

The Times’ story asserted that during the period of counting absentee and late-arriving mail-in ballots, RCP took three days longer than other news organizations to call Pennsylvania for Joe Biden. It noted disapprovingly that we aggregated stories from other news outlets quoting Trump supporters who questioned the election results. It suggested that the RCP Poll Averages were manipulated to be favorable to Donald Trump. Peters focused on RCP staff layoffs in September 2017, and claimed we’d hired partisan Republicans to replace them.

Sounds about right. Once it looked like Biden was winning the partisan media had to swing into action and start the ELECTION DENIER theme.

From the Times:
Real Clear became one of the most prominent platforms for elevating unverified and reckless stories about the president’s political opponents, through a mix of its own content and articles from across conservative media.

Remember, for the partisan left wing press, there IS NO other point of view other than their own. But what did RCP actually publish?

Overall, RCP ran 374 news stories or opinion pieces on our front page between Nov. 4 (the morning after the 2020 election) and Nov. 17, the day the New York Times went after RealClearPolitics. Sixteen of them were from the New York Times itself, including two columns from Maureen Dowd and one from Paul Krugman. The rest were a mix of news and opinion, from outlets ranging from those on the liberal side (The New Yorker, The Nation, Slate, etc.) to the conservative outlets (Washington Examiner, The Federalist, the Daily Caller, etc.) and everything in between, including CBS News, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, The Hill, and many more. Our assurance to readers has always been to present all angles and perspectives of political events, a promise we have kept.

The simple fact is that the amount of liberal material published in RCP every week dwarfs the annual conservative content in the New York Times.

Anyways, the Times did what left-leaning media outfits do, it had a narrative it wanted out there and it wrote a piece in support of it.

In his email informing Bevan of the story he was writing, Peters said he was looking into RCP’s election analyses on the grounds that they “tended to skew toward or favor Trump.” He said he was focusing on the RCP Polling Averages, “which your competitors have questioned for including Rasmussen, Trafalgar and others.”

This complaint doesn’t withstand scrutiny either. First, to the degree the RCP Poll Averages favored one candidate over the other, they favored the Democrat Joe Biden more than the Republican Donald Trump. Second, in the seven closest states in the 2020 election – those decided by three percentage points or less – the RCP Poll Averages were demonstrably more accurate than the New York Times’ own poll, and it wasn’t even close.

As you can see from the chart below, in five of the seven battleground states in 2020, the Times was off by more than four points in Biden’s favor.

Read the whole thing. The Times is one of the worst media outfits on the planet and they shouldn't be expected to be anything other than a reliable generator of left wing narratives.