On July 3, the Telegraph revealed the results of a YouGov poll with the following headline: “Britons see U.S. as vulgar empire builder.”

The poll was shocking. Most Britons—65 percent—think U.S. policies and actions make the world a worse place to live in. Sixty-nine percent say their opinion of the United States has dropped in recent years. On issues concerning President George W. Bush’s leadership, a solid majority disapproves. Most feel that Americans—and even American troops—are handling the Iraq situation badly. Fifty-eight percent say the U.S. “is essentially an imperial power, one that wants to dominate the world by one means or another.” When asked to choose between “vulgar” and “sophisticated” as a description of America (a quite crude either-or construction by the pollsters, to be sure), 65 percent opted for vulgar. Long story short, Britons largely do not like the American government.

In the face of such a profoundly negative poll, the U.S. Embassy in London responded. Deputy Chief of Mission David T. Johnson claimed that polling the embassy commissioned shows that attitudes toward the United States have risen favorably since 2004, a sharp contrast to YouGov’s poll. Then, he turned his response toward the Telegraph itself: “With respect to the poll’s assertions about American society, we bear some of the blame for not successfully communicating America’s extraordinary dynamism. But frankly, so does the media.”

Comparing the poll results to the Telegraph article, it’s easy to see why the embassy responded that way: While the results themselves were condemning enough of American society; the Telegraph’s coverage of the poll was even more so. The Telegraph wrote: “Most Britons see America as a cruel, vulgar, arrogant society, riven by class and racism, crime-ridden, obsessed with money and led by an incompetent hypocrite.” Note the words in italics: They didn’t appear in the poll at all. Additionally, the numbers themselves were misreported. The Telegraph referred to the 58 percent who view the U.S. as imperialistic as “more than two thirds” and inserted stronger adjectives such as “hypocritically” and “cruel” in place of actual poll language.

The Telegraph didn’t report that 54 percent of Britons said they feel either fairly positive or very positive toward the U.S.; a full 70 percent claim to like Americans, another tidbit the Telegraph omitted.

The lesson: Britons may not like American leadership—but the British media like it even less, to the point of being willing to skew poll results in their reporting.

In the end, both of these conclusions reflect a sad state of affairs between traditional allies Britain and America, whose fate, according to biblical prophecy, is essentially one and the same.