Last Friday, in our Week in Review, I suggested that William Boardman of Reader Supported News was being unfair when he accused the New York Times of journalistic malpractice for how it is covering Sanders’s campaign. I take back my charge. I would say now the Times is not just committing journalistic malpractice, but doing a damage to politics as a whole.

On Saturday, Bernie Sanders held the largest town hall meeting of the 2016 campaign to date in Phoenix, Arizona – 11,000 people. On Sunday, he spoke to crowds of 8,000 in Dallas and 5,200 in Houston.

But I didn’t pull those numbers from the Times. Here’s what the Grey Lady had to say about it, at the bottom of a daily roundup titled “Hillary Clinton Weighs Using Donald Trump Against His Party” under the subhead What We’re Reading Elsewhere:

And Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont continues to draw huge crowds, including, The Guardian reports, in Texas on Sunday, where he spoke in front of 5,000 in Houston and 8,000 in Dallas.

That’s it. A link to the Guardian. A subordinate clause about Texas. Nothing about Phoenix. The paper did publish two articles – one by staff, one by the AP – about protestors getting on stage at Netroots Nation.

Even weirder: Thinking that maybe I had missed an article in my search, I clicked on “bernie sanders phoenix” in the related searches list at the bottom of the result page and up popped one article: “In 10 State Primaries, Candidates Scurry Not to Look Like Politicians.” It was published in September 1990, proving that we’ve been disgusted with politics for quite a while.

It’s not as though the Times is suffering from a deficiency of 2016 election reporting generally. On Monday, it ran a piece headed “In Facebook Chat, Hillary Clinton Tells of Her Love of Pantsuits, and Jabs Her Rivals.” That’s right; Hillary’s love of pantsuits trumps coverage of the largest political rally so far in the 2016 campaign.

And speaking of Trump: He gets a whole topic page on the Times web site. Bernie’s articles occasionally get a tag at the bottom with his name. Not always, mind, and not always the same name – I’ve seen “Sanders, Bernard.”

Usually,  newspapers are in love with the underdog, which, in a strange meaning of the phrase, is what Donald Trump is – we know he won’t win the Republican nomination. Disfavored runners make the race more interesting. And more important than the entertainment value, candidates who speak their mind occasionally get people to think about policies in ways that are entirely identical to how their chosen party talks about issues.

But there’s a crucial difference between, say, Bernie and Donald, disfavored underdogs though they both may be: One is elevating our national conversation, talking about real problems and real ways to solve them, speaking in a clarion voice about the values that make America the land where hard work and honesty pay off. The chief contribution of the other is to publicly belittle a man who has seen the inside of a prison camp torture chamber.

The Times and, to a lesser extent, other media organizations have got to figure out whose voice they want to amplify.

I’ll be sending a version of the above to Margaret Sullivan, the public editor of the Times, because I’d like to know who is covering Bernie and what the editorial process is for deciding which events to cover. You can reach her yourself at public@nytimes.com.