No Left Wing Bias To See Here, Part 901

Gotta love the left-wing dishrag, publisher of all the news that's fit to print, so long as it can be misinterpreted and manipulated first. It's been awhile since I've had a chance to chop up the Times, but it's good to see others taking up the cause.

Here's the first two paragraphs from Adam Nagourney's article regarding the polling numbers for Congress, titled "Only 25% in poll Approve of Congress"...

With barely seven weeks until the midterm elections, Americans have an overwhelmingly negative view of the Republican-controlled Congress, with substantial majorities saying that they disapprove of the job it is doing and that its members do not deserve re-election, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The disdain for Congress is as intense as it has been since 1994, when Republicans captured 52 seats to end 40 years of Democratic control of the House and retook the Senate as well. It underlines the challenge the Republican Party faces in trying to hold on to power in the face of a surge in anti-incumbent sentiment.

Wow, I guess GOP staffers on the Hill might want to start looking for new jobs. Unless they choose to read a few paragraphs further down...

What is more, it seems highly unlikely Democrats will experience a sweep similar to the one Republicans experienced in 1994. Most analysts judge only about 40 House seats to be in play at the moment, compared with over 100 seats in play at this point 12 years ago, in large part because redistricting has created more safe seats for both parties.

Hey, maybe Nagourney's not really trying to do anything misleading. After all, it's not like his numbers are misleading in any way. Wait -- maybe they are. Dean Barnett notes the following...

Naturally, this being a Nagourney write-up of a New York Times poll, it contains a predictable casual falsehood. In June of 1996, a scant 19% of Americans approved of Congress. That would seem to be more disdainful than the current 25% approval, and it would also seem to be “since 1994.”

...As far as the larger point is concerned, the Republican congress in 1996 spent the entire year bopping along with poll results similar to the current Congress’. Oddly, the fact that those polls failed to produce a Democratic tsunami escapes Nagourney’s highly trained reporter’s eye.

If they had produced any sort of tsunami, Nagourney would have noticed, because Al Gore would have blamed global warming. Mickey Kaus has more...

For a top-tier reporter, Nagourney's surprisingly weak in the deceptive-but-not-inaccurate ass-covering billboard hype-sentence-construction aspect of his job. .... I'd add that Nagourney flatly says "Bush had not improved his own or his party's standing through his intense campaign of speeches"--this before noting that a) the percentage of Americans who approve of his Iraq policy had increased (30 to 36%), and b) the "number of people who called terrorism [a rare GOP-leaning issue] the most important issue facing the country doubled." Not a huge turnaround, but not "not improved" either.

(hat tip: Instapundit) Tom McGuire and McQ have even more fun with Nagourney, particularly Maguire.

To be fair, I think I've noticed something -- Nagourney effectively sees no difference between 6 percentage points in Bush's approval rating on Iraq, as Kaus noted. He also sees no difference between Congress' 25% approval rating this year and the 19% approval rating in 1994 -- again, 6 points. Maybe reporters at the dishrag are simply bad with small numbers. They better learn, considering newspaper circulation numbers generally.