This one is all over the internet:
CNN
Power Line
Fox
USA Today
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
How to write a New York Times article to make it seem like women work harder than men
It's simple. You just have to include information that supports your thesis, while leaving out information that supports a different thesis . . .
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Friday, June 20, 2008
The NYT ignores yet another gaffe from the Obama campagin
Saturday, June 14, 2008
The NYT wants you to believe that foodborne disease is on the rise
Last year, the NYT published a claim by Paul Krugman that
Without question, America’s food safety system has degenerated over the past six years.
Just in case we hadn't gotten the message, Krugman repeated himself yesterday on the editorial page:
Bad Cow Disease
What about reality? Are we really facing a resurgence of foodborne disease? Enter the Centers for Disease Control, which keeps statistics on foodborne diseases. They track both cases and outbreaks. Going through their reports, and graphing their numbers, we end up with the following (click the chart to enlarge it):
Turns out foodborne disease has been more or less steady over the past eight years. Due to a methodological change at the CDC in 1998, prior data cannot usefully be compared. As expected, there is significant year to year variability. There may be a slight downward overall trend -- but the data are noisy enough that it's difficult to be sure.
Immediately after posting this, I will write the NYT, informing them of their error and linking to this post. If any correction is forthcoming, I'll post it on the blog.
Hat Tip: Alex Tabarrok
Without question, America’s food safety system has degenerated over the past six years.
Just in case we hadn't gotten the message, Krugman repeated himself yesterday on the editorial page:
By Paul Krugman
“Mary had a little lamb / And when she saw it sicken / She shipped it off to Packingtown / And now it’s labeled chicken.”
That little ditty famously summarized the message of “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s 1906 exposé of conditions in America’s meat-packing industry. Sinclair’s muckraking helped Theodore Roosevelt pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act — and for most of the next century, Americans trusted government inspectors to keep their food safe.
Lately, however, there always seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines — tainted spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes. The declining credibility of U.S. food regulation has even led to a foreign-policy crisis: there have been mass demonstrations in South Korea protesting the pro-American prime minister’s decision to allow imports of U.S. beef, banned after mad cow disease was detected in 2003.
How did America find itself back in The Jungle?
It started with ideology . . . .What about reality? Are we really facing a resurgence of foodborne disease? Enter the Centers for Disease Control, which keeps statistics on foodborne diseases. They track both cases and outbreaks. Going through their reports, and graphing their numbers, we end up with the following (click the chart to enlarge it):
Turns out foodborne disease has been more or less steady over the past eight years. Due to a methodological change at the CDC in 1998, prior data cannot usefully be compared. As expected, there is significant year to year variability. There may be a slight downward overall trend -- but the data are noisy enough that it's difficult to be sure.
Immediately after posting this, I will write the NYT, informing them of their error and linking to this post. If any correction is forthcoming, I'll post it on the blog.
Hat Tip: Alex Tabarrok
Friday, June 13, 2008
The NYT Blames Conservatives for a False Rumor Started on a pro-Hillary Blog
I cannot improve on the way Times Watch has exposed this deception.
The New York Times Supports Constitutional Rights for Terrorists, but not for Conservatives
Normally, this blog will deal with factual distortions at the NYT. That is, our main concerns are the times when the NYT alters reality in order to support its political bias.
However, two recent articles in the NYT is so galling that I am making an exception.
An article in the June 12 NYT was originally entitled "Out of Step with Allies, US Defends Freedom to Offend." So they were saying that the First Amendment makes us "out of step"?
Apparently this was too much even for the NYT, as the online version of the article is now entitled "Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech".
In paragraph 7 of the article, we learn what draws the NYT's ire:
Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minorities and religions — even false, provocative or hateful things — without legal consequence.
The Times then goes on to discuss Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan -- Mark Steyn.
To be sure, the article for which Steyn is on trial in Canada is provocative stuff, and some will find it hateful. But what about the Times' own article? Might Steyn find it to be provocative and hateful to be one of three major examples in an article, when the other two are Nazis and the KKK? Should the Times be prosecuted for doing such a thing?
And what about the Times' false, provocative, and hateful coverage of the Duke Lacrosse Case? Or the Times' false and provocative assertion that Saddam was not training terrorists? Should they be prosecuted for that?
Or is provocative speech unacceptable only when it is directed at minorities? Leaving Duke Lacrosse players, Mark Steyn, and George W. Bush [the implicit target of the Saddam assertion] all as fair game?
While the Times does quote from both sides of the dispute, it is clear enough that they want the reader to be on the side of regulation -- why else would they pick, as their other two examples, the KKK and the Nazis?
To go along with its assault on the First Amendment, the Times has an editorial celebrating the extension of habeus corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees, up to and including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This Supreme Court did this in the Boumediene case, by a 5-4 vote, on purely Constitutional grounds, as Congress had passed, and President Bush had signed, a law explicitly denying that right.
As far as legal precedent is concerned, during all of the nation's past wars, the military has had the power to keep POWs locked up until the conflict was over. The present conflict is different from others, both in terms of the nature of the enemy, and in the conflict's likely duration. But does that justify forcing the military to fight at a tremendous disadvantage?
To make matters perfectly clear, here is a passage from Justice Scalia's dissent, describing the activities of certain released Guantanamo detainees:
In one case, a detainee released from Guantanamo Bay masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese dam workers, one of whom was later shot to death when used as a human shield against Pakistani commandoes. See Khan & Lancaster, Pakistanis Rescue Hostage; 2nd Dies, Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2004, p. A18. Another former detainee promptly resumed his post as a senior Taliban commander and murdered a United Nations engineer and three Afghan soldiers. Mintz, supra. Still another murdered an Afghan judge. See Minority Report 13. It was reported only last month that a released detainee carried out a suicide bombing against Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq. See White, Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack, Washington Post, May 8, 2008, p. A18.
These are the people whom the Court gave habeus rights in its decision. And the NYT lauds that. Meanwhile, it publishes a news article which is thinly disguised criticism of Mark Steyn's First Amendment protection. Go figure.
Hat tip: CounterColumn
However, two recent articles in the NYT is so galling that I am making an exception.
An article in the June 12 NYT was originally entitled "Out of Step with Allies, US Defends Freedom to Offend." So they were saying that the First Amendment makes us "out of step"?
Apparently this was too much even for the NYT, as the online version of the article is now entitled "Unlike Others, U.S. Defends Freedom to Offend in Speech".
In paragraph 7 of the article, we learn what draws the NYT's ire:
Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minorities and religions — even false, provocative or hateful things — without legal consequence.
The Times then goes on to discuss Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan -- Mark Steyn.
To be sure, the article for which Steyn is on trial in Canada is provocative stuff, and some will find it hateful. But what about the Times' own article? Might Steyn find it to be provocative and hateful to be one of three major examples in an article, when the other two are Nazis and the KKK? Should the Times be prosecuted for doing such a thing?
And what about the Times' false, provocative, and hateful coverage of the Duke Lacrosse Case? Or the Times' false and provocative assertion that Saddam was not training terrorists? Should they be prosecuted for that?
Or is provocative speech unacceptable only when it is directed at minorities? Leaving Duke Lacrosse players, Mark Steyn, and George W. Bush [the implicit target of the Saddam assertion] all as fair game?
While the Times does quote from both sides of the dispute, it is clear enough that they want the reader to be on the side of regulation -- why else would they pick, as their other two examples, the KKK and the Nazis?
To go along with its assault on the First Amendment, the Times has an editorial celebrating the extension of habeus corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees, up to and including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This Supreme Court did this in the Boumediene case, by a 5-4 vote, on purely Constitutional grounds, as Congress had passed, and President Bush had signed, a law explicitly denying that right.
As far as legal precedent is concerned, during all of the nation's past wars, the military has had the power to keep POWs locked up until the conflict was over. The present conflict is different from others, both in terms of the nature of the enemy, and in the conflict's likely duration. But does that justify forcing the military to fight at a tremendous disadvantage?
To make matters perfectly clear, here is a passage from Justice Scalia's dissent, describing the activities of certain released Guantanamo detainees:
In one case, a detainee released from Guantanamo Bay masterminded the kidnapping of two Chinese dam workers, one of whom was later shot to death when used as a human shield against Pakistani commandoes. See Khan & Lancaster, Pakistanis Rescue Hostage; 2nd Dies, Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2004, p. A18. Another former detainee promptly resumed his post as a senior Taliban commander and murdered a United Nations engineer and three Afghan soldiers. Mintz, supra. Still another murdered an Afghan judge. See Minority Report 13. It was reported only last month that a released detainee carried out a suicide bombing against Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq. See White, Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack, Washington Post, May 8, 2008, p. A18.
These are the people whom the Court gave habeus rights in its decision. And the NYT lauds that. Meanwhile, it publishes a news article which is thinly disguised criticism of Mark Steyn's First Amendment protection. Go figure.
Hat tip: CounterColumn
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