In a New York Times op-ed piece, Paul Krugman pulls a fast one with the truth:

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida’s ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore.

Sorry, Paul, but that’s just not true. In fact, the two studies commissioned by various media organizations found the exact opposite: Bush would have won a full state-wide recount.

According to CNN:

If a recount of Florida’s disputed votes in last year’s close presidential election had been allowed to proceed by the U.S. Supreme Court, Republican George W. Bush still would have won the White House, two newspapers reported Wednesday.

The Miami Herald and USA Today conducted a comprehensive review of 64,248 “undercounted” ballots in Florida’s 67 counties that ended last month.

The other study had similar findings:

A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies [...]

The Times should know better than to print Krugman’s blatant misrepresentation. After all, the paper is listed as the first sponsor of the NORC study:

Included in the group are The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Tribune Publishing (which includes the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and a number of other newspapers), CNN, the Associated Press, the St. Petersburg Times and the Palm Beach Post.

Of course, because Krugman doesn’t actually name the studies he’s apparently citing, he might not be talking about these two, which were widely regarded as the most thorough, comprehensive and credible. Maybe the consortium of Mad Magazine, Cracked and Comedy Central came to different conclusions.

The Times may eventually issue a retraction on Krugman’s fact-twisting, but by that point, hundreds of thousands of people will have read Krugman’s article and assumed that, since it ran in the nation’s “newspaper of record,” it must be true. The correction itself—if it is ever issued at all—will be buried days later in a small corner of the paper and will barely be noticed.

Good thing all those editors at the Times provide the layers of rigorous fact-checking that blogs lack!