Paul Krugman this morning said in the New York Times that two media consortiums retrospectively awarded the 2000 election to Al Gore. I pointed out earlier this morning that Consortium #1 said the opposite. So did Consortium #2 — in words that appeared in the New York Times itself on November 12, 2001:

“A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year’s presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore. A close examination of the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court’s order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court.

“Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff — filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties — Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations.”

Only at this point in the piece does the consortium recount allow for the possibility of a Gore victory: “But the consortium, looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots. This also assumes that county canvassing boards would have reached the same conclusions about the disputed ballots that the consortium’s independent observers did.”

But given the major variable in this example — that the country canvassing boards would have counted each rejected ballot the way the Times and its brethren organizations did — this scenario borders on the science-fictional.

Merely by pulling up the New York Times’s own electronic morgue at his desk, Krugman could have avoided making the mistake of claiming that Gore was ruled the winner in two independent media counts. If he didn’t, he’s lazy. If he he did, he’s spectacularly dishonest. And he doesn’t strike me as lazy. (Hat tip to reader Lawrence H.)