Overall, the US seems to be doing about as well as continental Europe in ways that actually matter, like deaths. What the NYT did was cherry-picking figures - for example, for a while last winter they kept comparing Spanish cases to Florida cases to downplay the Spanish wave as less bad, even though the trajectory of the Spanish outbreak was much scarier, and then suddenly forgot about that comparison when Spain passed them. (The Spanish press pointed out that their outbreak was worse than the US based on the NYT's metric and described it as such, which is partly how I noticed it happen.) I think that was a replacement for some other, broader comparison between the US and Europe they dropped earlier on after it stopped making the US look bad. It was really blatant too - they kept on reusing the same comparisions week after week as the gap gradually narrowed, and then when it would've flipped poof that metric went away.

Similarly, they stopped comparing the actual per-capita level of Covid testing in South Korea and the USA when the US passed them and not only started using meaningless metrics like test postivity (the two countries had... very different ideas on who to test, which didn't include most people with symptoms in South Korea) but outright claimed it was a lie to say the US was now the country doing more Covid testing using the swapped metric. I'm pretty sure there were quite a few others too which I've forgotten about or just missed. Haven't really been following their reporting so much lately.

US compared to EU countries in CIVID deaths per capita [1].

[1] http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countri...

The constant transitions in the narrative about Sweden are perhaps a good example.

At first it was "Sweden has become the world's cautionary tale", and "a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns".

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-c...

Then Sweden dropped to the bottom of the rankings in both Europe and the world for deaths. It did much better than the UK and America. Suddenly it's not got any lessons for the world anymore, and when it's mentioned at all it's only to tell us that for unclear reasons it can't be compared to anything except its direct neighbours. Then Baltic states did worse than Sweden so the narrative became, you can't compare to anything except a cherry-picked list of specifically Scandinavian states.

The media is a major, major driving force of political polarization everywhere, because it acts as a firehose of ideological propaganda. It's not even the stories you see that's the biggest problem. It's the things they know about but never tell you, in case it'd make you doubt your commitment to the journalist's ideology.