Bias or Incompetence?

The DU front page leads today with Approval at all-time low for Bush. Unfortunately, our plucky DU reporter who's recycling the story from the NYT either didn't get the memo or doesn't care that the NYT isn't the best place to rely on for one's news. You would think that DU reporters would be capable of a few minutes of net research, but evidently, in their quest to uphold the historic standards of the Daily Universe, they can't achieve either timeliness or accuracy.

Kausfiles [standing link not available, scroll down] analyzes the NYT story:

Kerry dropped seven points in a month...
But the Times coverage isn't really that bad. It's worse! Soxblog also busts Nagourney and Elder for what appears to be dissembling. They report, in the very first sentence of their piece, that
"President Bush's job approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll."
But if you look at the previous poll results listed in the Times web site, you learn that a month ago Bush's approval rating was a point lower and his disapproval rating was a point higher. Bush has actually gained in the past month. It doesn't appear to be, you know, true that his "approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency." It was worse last month. The same goes for Bush's favorability ratings, which were lower last month (36 favorable/47 unfavorable) than this month (39 favorable/45 unfavorable)...
Readers are supposed to read those charts for trends, but somehow Nagouney and Elder are allowed to ignore them in order to deceptively pluck out their anti-Bush theme.

RCP has more:

This time around ... the CBS/NYT is again one of the only polls in the most recent grouping showing Kerry leading Bush - though it shows a big move toward Bush and is considerably closer to the overall average as two other recent polls (IBD/TIPP and Rasmussen) have the race tied.

One could write the DU's story off as simple incompetence, but then how to account for the gratuitous Moore/F911 reference?