“News analysis” is one of the slipperier terms in journalism. It’s often a way for ostensibly neutral reporters to put their political views forward via loose associations rather than argument: a way, that is, to run a crummy op-ed while pretending to be doing something else.

The New York Times is running that kind of news analysis under the headline, “Alito’s ‘Godliness’ Comment Echoes a Broader Christian Movement.” Right away, there’s a problem, since Alito didn’t actually even say the word “godliness.”

Do things get better in the first few sentences of the article? Nope.

It’s a phrase not commonly associated with legal doctrine: returning America to “a place of godliness.”

And yet when asked by a woman posing as a Catholic conservative at a dinner last week, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. appeared to endorse the idea. The unguarded moment added to calls for greater scrutiny by Democrats, many of whom are eager to open official investigations into outside influence at the Supreme Court.

Alito wasn’t being asked about legal doctrine, so he didn’t refer to it. There’s your supposedly startling, lede-worthy paradox explained.

Dias and Lerer take the quote — which, again, was not even spoken by Alito! — as a license to range far afield: “This week in Indianapolis, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America, are voting on issues like restricting in vitro fertilization and further limiting women from pastoral positions.”

Oddly, they never find the space to note that Alito, in the very audiotape that is the basis of the article, repeatedly insisted that his role as a justice in moral controversies is by nature limited (“We have a very defined role”).