You gotta hand it to the New York Post. Perhaps even more so than it’s conservative corporate cousin Fox News the Post will apparently do anything to find and promote only the facts that support it’s masters’ editorial positions. The Sunday front page is a classic example:

The Post finds the one national poll that actually gives John McCain the lead. Reporter Ginger Adams Otis’s story notes that “A Zogby tracking poll, taken Friday, shows McCain with a 1-point lead over Barack Obama, 48 to 47 percent.” After a number of quotes from unnamed McCain advisors and from Zogby himself about the amazing poll numbers Otis does mention, “other national surveys continue to give Obama a comfortable lead, and even Zogby’s three-day poll showed the Illinois senator with a 5-point advantage….”

Putting aside the “journalism” here, there’s more than a bit of deja vu in this. John Zogby has a history of providing last minute polls for the Post that are unlike those of any other pollsters yet magically support the Post’s editorial positions.

Take the 2000 New York Senate race between Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio. I’m sure you can’t imagine which candidate the Post was supporting…. In that case the final Zogby poll, trumpeted by the Post to no end, gave Lazio a 46-45 lead over Clinton. Four other final polls gave her the lead by 6 to 12 points. Of course Zogby and the Post got it wrong: Clinton won by 12.

In 1998 the Post and Zogby had a similar miraculous apparition of victory for their favored candidate. On the Sunday before the election the Post front-paged the results of breathtaking Zogby poll giving Republican Senator Al D’Amato a fractional lead — big news since Chuck Schumer had pulled ahead in everyone else’s polls. Schumer won by 9 points.

Of course the Post is not alone in all of this nonsense. Their ideological bedfellows on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page (and now corporate sibling) are more than happy to focus only on the data and polls that support their positions.

For a good laugh check out this piece by the illustrious John Fund from October 30, 2000 predicting Hillary Clinton’s loss in the Senate race. Why do guys like this never have to answer for being so very very very wrong?

Oh, and if you’re looking for today’s story in the Post? It’s gone. Replaced by a story that makes no mention of the Zogby poll. It has been scrubbed from their website and cannot be located in their archives. Leave no fingerprints….