Take, for instance, Trip Gabriel’s front-page New York Times report on October 8, in which he explains: “The legal fights are over laws that Republican-led state governments passed in recent years to more tightly regulate voting, in the name of preventing fraud. Critics argue that the restrictions are really efforts to discourage African-Americans, students and low-income voters, who tend to favor Democrats.”

“Critics”? How is it that neither Gabriel nor his editors thought to interject into this nonsensical “he said/she said” exchange some actual evidence? Nowhere in this report of more than 1,200 words does the story mention the fact that in none of these states is voter fraud a genuine phenomenon. (If you wanted decent coverage of this issue, you would have had to rely on the “reporting” of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show rather than Gabriel and The New York Times.)