The New York Times has been taken to task reg­u­larly and with good reason for its unwill­ing­ness to call a lie a lie.*

Things were look­ing up yes­ter­day, how­ever, as the Times’s Michael Cooper got away with this strongly worded con­clu­sion, and on the front page, no less:

Dis­cussing his crime-​fighting suc­cess as mayor, Mr. Giu­liani told a tele­vi­sion inter­viewer that New York was “the only city in Amer­ica that has reduced crime every single year since 1994.” In New Hamp­shire this week, he told a public forum that when he became mayor in 1994, New York “had been aver­ag­ing like 1,800, 1,900 mur­ders for almost 30 years.” When a recent Repub­li­can debate turned to the ques­tion of fiscal respon­si­bil­ity, he boasted that “under me, spend­ing went down by 7 percent.”

All of these state­ments are incom­plete, exag­ger­ated or just plain wrong. And while, to be sure, all can­di­dates use mis­lead­ing sta­tis­tics from time to time, Mr. Giu­liani has made sta­tis­tics a cen­tral part of his can­di­dacy as he cam­paigns on his record.

Yes, there are bigger fish to fry, and yes, it’s a little late, but at least it’s a start.

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*Note: Dan Froomkin at the Wash­ing­ton Post explains why that par­tic­u­lar word almost never finds its way into news accounts: “Lying is prob­a­bly the one word main­stream jour­nal­ists are the most averse to using when recount­ing what the pres­i­dent said—even when they know he’s not telling the truth. The act of lying requires not just the pre­sen­ta­tion of false infor­ma­tion, but an inten­tion to deceive. Reporters—and, par­tic­u­larly editors—are noto­ri­ously resis­tant to ascribe such voli­tion with­out iron­clad evidence.”