Why I hate the media

Economist Greg Mankiw pretty much sums up why caveat emptor should apply to media coverage:

A reader calls this sentence from The New Republic to my attention:

Mankiw...left his post as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors after publicly supporting offshoring.

The sentence is true in the same sense that this sentence is true:

Japan bombed Pearl Harbor after Thomas Jefferson completed the Lousiana Purchase.

Both sentences get the chronology right, but they mislead the reader by compressing the time line of events and insinuating a cause-and-effect that is absent in the historical record. In the first case, the correct statement would be:

Mankiw got into political hot water by making positive comments about offshoring. Twelve months later, with the presidential election over and the furor over offshoring having largely subsided, his two-year leave of absence from Harvard came to an end, and he returned to his tenured chair as had been planned all along.

Youth Council has also been stung on occasion by this phenomenon. Actually, the word 'occasion' is a bit misleading..as occasion would seem to suggest that it only happened once...

IMDB quote of the day

From an IMDB review of Shattered Glass (2003):

"It's not a great film (aye, there's the rub), but it is a great movie. It's entertainment, pure and simple, but it's also entertainment with depth. In that respect, it's a little like Spider Man 2."

From Jason Forestein (jay4stein79@yahoo.com)

In the words of Ben Affleck in J&SBSB:

"The Internet has given everyone in America a voice and evidently everyone in America has chosen to use that voice to bitch about movies"

Too bad they decided to abandon all sense of logic while doing so..