The Gray Lady appears to have been caught red-handed -- skewing their Olympics coverage to pander to the U-S-of-A.
The New York Times has come under fire from users on social media in recent days, after consistently ranking the US atop the medal count from competitions in Tokyo.
While it's true that the US had the most medals through Tuesday morning, the Americans in fact were trailing China in golds -- which is the official ranking criteria -- by a healthy margin.
The official Olympics web site, for example, was ranking China as No. 1 on Tuesday morning, apparently using gold medals as the primary metric. China had 32 golds to 24 for the US, followed by 19 for host Japan and 14 for Australia.
Even more perplexing, the Times seems to have arbitrarily changed their medal-counting criteria from the Rio Olympics in 2016, when they ranked Britain in second place ahead of China, apparently based on Britain having more golds and despite China having more total medals.
After the Times used total medals to determine the leaders in Tokyo for several days in a row, the message to many users was clear: America "first," no matter what.
Apparently feeling the heat on social, or perhaps just realizing they'd gotten it wrong, the Times on Wednesday morning tweeted out the proper leader board -- the gold medal leaders:
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