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: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...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.
posted by Dileepa at 6:52 am
2 Comments:
You should read Mankiw's entire blog entry. Seems he forgot the old adage that one should never attribute to malice what can be explained by ineptitude. :)
The blog entry was updated after I post the entry.. which is always a danger with linking to stuff on the net I guess!
I think the principle is still pretty sound. I know from a past life as a reviewer at a startup (which has since grown considerably in size) that there was pressure to tone down some uber sarcastic reviews of uber crap products for fear of alienating the producers (company was reliant on the producers to keep sending them stuff to review).
And if you don't believe that stuff applies to properly trained journos, just watch FOXNEWS :)
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