THE NEW YORK TIMES has lately come under a barrage of media criticism, not all of it from “the right,” about the extent to which editorial bias has infected the paper’s hard news columns. And already some of that criticism has been directed specifically against the paper’s A-section reporting on its own, proprietary public opinion research (commissioned in partnership with CBS News). So what I’m about to offer isn’t exactly without precedent. The bias in question, however, may well be without precedent; I can’t remember anything quite like it, at least. “Poll Says Bush Needs to Pay Heed to Weak Economy,” written up by Times correspondents Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder, and awarded pride of place–the front-page lede–in yesterday morning’s edition, isn’t just slanted (or misleading or imbalanced or overstated or any other word commonly applied to such things). The story is an outright fraud, a falsehood, a work of fiction.