Well, as far as the Republican presidential candidates go, I think it’s safe to say that the NYT is rooting for the home team. At the Right-Wing Religious Nuts Values Voter Summit, Rudy Giuliani got only 1.85% of the votes in the Family Research Council straw poll, which placed him well behind Undecided (5.7%) and every other Republican candidate except John McCain (1.4%). Not only that, but when the Values Voters voted on which candidates would be the “least acceptable,” he got almost twice as many votes as famed madrassa student Barack Hussein Obama (9.2% to 4.8%).

So how did the NYT cover this debacle?

In the paper’s front-page article, it was Giuliani’s name that adorned the headline and that anchored the first sentence, it was Giuliani’s image that appeared in the article, and it was Giuliani’s speech that was excerpted. And at the newspaper’s website, it was Giuliani’s Values Voter speech that was available in video form. He was the only GOP candidate to receive that kind of all-hands-on-deck weekend coverage from the Times.

(…)

Indeed, the Times’ news account could have been written by Giuliani’s communications team, emphasizing how the candidate courageously came to face his most distrusting critics and how, through the power of “direct talk,” he (allegedly) won them over. That’s great spin. It just didn’t reflect reality. And neither did the Times’ reporting.

(…)

This was the print edition headline:

Religious Right Divides Its Vote
At Meeting, 2 Are Close — Giuliani is Praised

The “2″ referred to Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, who finished a close one-two in the straw poll. Yet neither man was mentioned by name in The New York Times headline, and neither man was mentioned in the article’s opening sentence. Giuliani, however, was. Notice also that Giuliani was singled out for distinction in the headline for drawing “praise.”

How many people were quoted in The New York Times article actually praising Giuliani’s speech? One.

The New York Times appears to have performed its own version of the miracle of the loaves and the fishes on Giuliani’s Values Voter support, while performing the same trick in reverse on his “least acceptable” rating, which it mentions only in passing at the tail end of a Caucus blog entry.

This is a very interesting form of media wankery: Usually they stick to stories that make Republicans look undeservedly good, and/or Democrats undeservedly bad. But in this case, NYT is shamelessly promoting one Republican over other Republicans, and they appear to be the only major publication doing so. I can’t think of an angle, other than that they just want to prop up the hometown guy… or else they’re afraid to piss him off.

Of course, it goes without saying that the NYT will do the same for Hillary, right? Why, we could have an all-New York election! It would be just like a Subway Series, but with warmongers!

UPDATE: From the comments, I think amberglow may have found a reason…

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