John,
President Biden is losing to Donald Trump. At least that was the big story this weekend when The New York Times and Sienna College published their latest battleground state poll of the 2024 Presidential election:
The bad results for President Biden went viral everywhere: on Fox News, Meet the Press, the front page of the NYTimes website, and on the extremely popular Times-produced podcast The Daily, experts went deep into analyzing why Donald Trump appeared to be winning support from key groups that helped carry Biden to victory in 2020.
But here’s the truth: the NYTimes/Sienna polling that the media breathlessly covered as bad news for President Biden wasn’t the only NYTimes-affiliated poll released recently.
A day after the Sienna poll, The New York Times and Ipos released a national survey showing Biden leading Trump by two points.
John, instead of the 🚨five-alarm fire, breaking news🚨 coverage the Sienna poll got, this was The New York Times headline for the Ipos poll that showed Biden ahead:
There is no mention of Biden (or Trump, for that matter) and certainly no indication that Biden might be winning.
Instead, the article is full of inside baseball analysis of the challenges of polling a third-party candidate. To find the results where Biden is ahead, you have to click through to a seven-page PDF document hyperlinked in the article.
COURIER corrects misinformation John – we don’t spread it, so believe us when we tell you that we get that there is nuance here. A national poll is not the same as a swing-state poll (in fact, there is evidence that state-level polling is less accurate than national polling in Presidential elections). As inflation remains high and protests against the war in Gaza continue to break out on college campuses, it doesn’t take a poll to tell you President Biden has some work to do to shore up a few key constituencies.
The alarm here is about The Times' confusing decision to run a full-court press on the bad Biden polling while ignoring the poll that showed more positive results for the President.
The Biden campaign won’t be surprised by any of this. They’ve long argued that The New York Times is biased in its election coverage.
That troubling sentiment was supported by a recent Politico report that said The Times has a “singular obsession” with President Biden and that the Times’ biased reporting “often blurs the asymmetries between former President Donald Trump and Biden.”
At COURIER, we believe The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets are responsible for telling the truth in their coverage, especially when that truth is nuanced.
Relying on an outdated “both sides” model that prioritizes profits and the “horse race” over nuance leads to situations like this, where millions of Americans now believe President Biden is losing despite the existence of data (from the same source) that suggests otherwise.
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Thank you so much,
The COURIER team