Month: August 2007
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When copy editors attack!
Someone at the New York Times correction desk is seriously annoyed about their problems spelling the Attorney General’s name: An article in some copies on Wednesday about Congressional efforts to pass legislation to expand the government’s electronic wiretapping powers misspelled — yet again — the surname of the attorney general of the United States, in
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NY Times: An op-ed page about nothing
Is there some sort of office contest where New York Times columnists compete to write columns on the most lazy or insipid topics? First, we had Gail Collins on John Edwards and tangerines. Then David Brooks spent a whole column on an obscure book about old age from 1911 that he picked up while “rushing
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The Fox News effect: More Republicans
The economists Stefano DellaVigna (UC Berkeley) and Ethan Kaplan (Stockholm University) have published the final version of their paper “The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (sub. req. – see also an earlier non-gated version). Here is the abstract, which summarizes a striking result that has apparently held
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Is inattention causing shift on Iraq?
A reader who prefers to remain anonymous suggests a parsimonious explanation for why Iraq “right decision” numbers are up in public opinion polls — inattention to the news during the summer due to vacations, etc. He did some preliminary analysis of the time series and couldn’t find enough data to draw a strong conclusion either
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Replicating the WSJ’s “Laffer curve” graph
Back on July 13, the Wall Street Journal editorial page published an editorial (sub. req.) claiming that “Lower corporate tax rates with fewer loopholes can lead to more, not less, tax revenue from business,” a claim that it attempted to support with this graphic: But as numerous bloggers pointed out at the time, the alleged
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David Carr, wacky punster
New York Times media columnist David Carr attempts an awkward riff today on the classic New York Post headline “Headless Body in Topless Bar”: What will The Journal be with Mr. Murdoch at the helm? At heart, he’s a tabloid newsman but critics expecting headlines like “Hedgeless Funds in Stop-Loss Market” may be disappointed. Uh,
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What a Democrat would inherit from Bush
With all their excitement about potentially taking back the White House, few Democrats seem to have given serious thought to what exactly they will be inheriting from President Bush. It’s increasingly clear to everyone that Bush will delay any serious withdrawal from Iraq until after he leaves office, forcing a Democratic president to withdraw and
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Robert Samuelson: Banal and wrong!
Mark Thoma distills the collected works of Robert Samuelson into three banal claims: Someone said that Robert Samuelson thinks three things are true, deficits are bad, there’s a demographic crisis coming, and both parties share the blame for any problem. Based upon these beliefs, he’s been writing the same column in one form or another