Month: December 2007
-
Margin of error alert: Obama not up in Iowa
As the NYT’s Janet Elder points out (via Andrew Gelman), journalists are once again hyping minor differences in polling while neglecting to mention the margin of error in their results. Here’s a great example from the Des Moines Register’s article on its new poll for the Iowa Democratic caucus (my emphasis): Barack Obama has pulled
-
Obama’s bizarre open access plan
A few weeks ago, I noted that Barack Obama had apparently taken his goo-goo tendencies to new extremes by promising that “[w]hen government officials meet with corporate lobbyists, you should be able to watch the meeting” in an email to supporters (PDF). At the time, I questioned whether the line was vetted policy, but today’s
-
Clark Hoyt on NYT ’08 fact-checking
Clark Hoyt, the former Knight Ridder reporter and editor (now McClatchy), is living up to his promise as public editor of the New York Times. Today he takes the paper to task for failing to fact-check candidate claims in a timely fashion — one of the reasons that McClatchy’s coverage is often so much better