The New York Times surprised its audience on Friday morning with no front-page story on the debate. They just told readers to go to NYTimes.com. If Trump was the candidate who had a terrible debate, would they do that?

Online, they admitted in an online headline that “Biden Campaign Plunged Into Crisis After Halting Debate Performance” after Thursday evening’s embarrassment. But political reporter Michael Gold still played defense for the paper's preferred candidate. If the biased headline didn’t give the game away (“Trump’s Debate Performance: Relentless Attacks and Falsehoods” ), then complaining about Trump both “seizing” and having “pounced” in a single sentence makes Gold’s pro-Biden slant clear.

For most of Thursday night’s debate, former President Donald J. Trump verbally pummeled President Biden, painting his political opponent as an ineffective leader with a torrent of attacks that were frequently false, lacked context or were vague enough to be misleading.

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He tried to accuse Mr. Biden of corruption, dubbing the president as a “Manchurian candidate” who was “paid by China,” a nod to frequent accusations of undue influence for which there is no evidence.

He directly blamed Mr. Biden for a wave of immigrants “coming in and killing our citizens at a level we’ve never” seen, a hyperbolic claim that is not backed up by available statistics.

After weeks of reporters relishing MAGA complaints about a debate format supposedly tilted against Trump, Gold whined that those rules kept Biden from challenging Trump. He even whined that the CNN moderators failed to fact-check Trump, as if they were supposed to interfere in the flow of the debate on Democrat Biden’s behalf.

But the barrage of attacks during the debate was particularly striking given that Mr. Biden was standing mere feet away from him, unable to interrupt or effectively challenge Mr. Trump because of debate rules that kept his microphone muted.

And as the debate’s moderators, the CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, focused on keeping the peace, they did not even try to fact-check Mr. Trump’s assertions, allowing them to stand unchallenged.

Mr. Biden got in a few licks, including some of the debate’s more memorable moments. He said Mr. Trump had the “morals of an alley cat” and accused him of having sex with a porn star while his wife was pregnant.

But by and large, Mr. Biden was on the defensive from the get-go in the face of a steady stream of insults, false characterizations and attacks from Mr. Trump.

Then came a classic sentence, with the reporter fitting in not one but two classic terms used by liberal reporters to denigrate effective Republican talking points:

Seizing on Mr. Biden’s halting speech early in the debate, Mr. Trump pounced at one moment when Mr. Biden trailed off, saying: “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

Gold even defended Biden’s indefensible immigration policies, via unlabeled liberal "experts."

Mr. Trump accused his successor of “ridiculous, insane and very stupid policies” that fostered a crime wave, pointing to high-profile killings that involved immigrants. He vaguely accused Mr. Biden of killing “so many at our border” by not curbing the surge of migrants, an assertion that he did not back up with statistics.

Experts have said that those heavily publicized cases do not represent a broader trend. Studies have concluded that immigration does not push up crime rates.