Month: November 2004
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AJR on campaign fact-checking
A long and thorough American Journalism Review piece on coverage of campaign 2004 is now online. For those who care, it has several quotes from me about the institutional pathologies of the political media and the need for more aggressive fact-checking.
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Michael Moore: Claims vs. reality
More prevarication from our good friend Michael Moore: Entertainment Weekly, 7/9/04: “The patriotic thing to do is to aspire to [make] this country the one that our founding fathers thought it should be. Anybody who works hard to do that, whether they’re conservative or liberal, is doing the work of a true American. I would
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We’re doomed
Context: George Lakoff is a UC-Berkeley linguist who has become the new guru of liberals who want to reframe the national debate. Via his book and the think tank he helped start, Lakoff argues for mechanically re-framing each issue from a liberal perspective, an approach we criticize in All the President’s Spin as another destructive
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Defying parody
You can’t make this shit up: Artest is promoting his record label, Truwarier, and said that with his other career endeavors he was trying to make his life more positive. “Having a record company and putting out my own CD. There’s clothes and shoes. There’s also an upcoming book deal that I’m trying to do,”
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Cat leaving bag on UC-Berkeley study
Despite their lack of social science credentials, the liberal activists at Media Matters are endorsing the highly problematic UC-Berkeley study of voting in Florida: The mainstream media have mostly ignored a statistical study conducted by faculty and students of the University of California at Berkeley sociology department on voting irregularities in Florida in the 2004
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Elections data and conspiracies
Kevin Drum has a good rundown of the problems with a UC Berkeley sociologist’s analysis of voting in Florida (PDF). It’s the same issue as Steven Freedman’s paper and the supposed optical scan anomalies — a tendentious result produced by people who don’t have a good background in the field. Kieran Healy shows in a
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A rule of thumb
Political scientist/blogger Dan Drezner has posted a link to his book manuscript, which argues that the great powers retain a great deal of regulatory power despite the much-hyped trend toward globalization. I’m no expert on the subject and haven’t read the whole manuscript, but it highlights a useful rule of thumb: people who argue that
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Homer announcers
Does anyone have a good explanation for what parts of the country tend to have announcers that explicitly root for the home team? I’m from the San Francisco Bay Area, and I’d say it’s rare to non-existent out there, but it seems shockingly pervasive to me in North Carolina — just noticed this again tonight
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Goo-goo II
Today David Broder weeps for Charlie Stenholm, another conservative Democrat who has gone down to defeat. The declining number of moderates in Congress is certainly cause for concern, but this is getting carried away: Bigger names are leaving Congress — notably former Democratic leaders Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt — but no one will be
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What genius came up with this one?
We have a huge deficit, but apparently someone in Congress