A bit of leap-year fact checking

On NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, they had a brief item about the leap year, reported by Renee Montagne:

We woke up this morning to the rarest of dates: February 29th, the odd extra day that comes every four years, since there are, apparently, more than 365 days in a year.

A few sentences later, she noted this:

So, every four years we get a leap day. Making some sort of adjustment is key, otherwise the calendar would slowly become out of synch with the seasons.

But then she added something strange: The Hebrew calendar adds a whole extra month, every 19 years.

Um, no. That’s not right.

The Hebrew calendar adds an extra month, Adar I^[1], but it has nothing to do with the extra quarter day: it’s to reconcile the lunar calendar with the solar one, and that shift is not slow^[2]. And the extra month is not inserted once every 19 years, but seven times every 19 years.

This stuff isn’t hard to get right... it just takes a little checking, and whoever wrote that NPR item just tossed it out there with no checking at all.

They must have gotten it with both barrels, and quickly. By the time I went online to check the audio, they had corrected the online version without a word about the error. The line about the Hebrew calendar was removed, and replaced by a bit of silliness: Not quite Christmas in July, but it might feel that way.

I like the way the New York Times makes its online corrections: they leave the error there, and tell you what the correction is. Too bad NPR doesn’t do the same.

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^[1] Yes, it’s odd, but the added month is considered Adar I, while Adar II is the normal one (just called Adar in the 12-in-19 off years).

^[2] This keeps, for example, Passover in the spring. The date moves around from year to year, but only within a few-week period. In contrast, the Muslim calendar, which is also lunar, does not have any correction. That means that there’s no resynch with the solar calendar, and Ramadan, for example, wanders throughout the year. Muslim friends tell me that the daytime fasting during Ramadan is much harder when it’s in June or July than when it’s in December or January.

Send me an e-mail?

The New York Times has not just gone astray with its payment scheme; it’s gone completely off the deep end, gotten lost in the forest, fallen off the cliff and into a pit, and is knee-deep in any other mixed and fractured metaphor you can devise... linguistically.

See, they have recently updated their style guide, removing, according to editor Philip Corbett, some aging or outdated technical terms, such as CD-ROM, floppy disk, Dictaphone, Usenet, newsgroups, VHS, CAD-CAM and I.S.D.N. Yes, they used to use periods in ISDN, as they still do in I.B.M., I.P. address, C.P.U., and others. But I’m happy to see that they’re eliminating the dots in USB, URL, and PDF.

They also agree with me on capitalizing Web and Internet.

But here’s where they now err:

We no longer have to write about people sending an e-mail message — we can call it an e-mail. The term is also acceptable as a verb. (For now, at least, we are keeping the hyphen for this and similar coinages like e-commerce and e-reader.)

I’m apathetic, disinterested on the hyphenation issue. I, myself, omit the hyphen and prefer email, but I think it’s fine either way. But I insist that email, avec hyphen ou sans, be used in a parallel way to mail. It only makes sense, yes? And one would never say, I sent him a mail. Of course not.

A letter is parallel to an email message, and they should keep it that way. If one wants to be shorter, it’s easy: I sent him email, works fine, just as I sent him mail, does.

But the New York Times is giving in to sloppy, lazy usage, such as is unbecoming the Gray Lady.

Oh, Noes!

The New York Times paywall cometh

Yesterday, the NY Times sent this message by email to all registered users. An excerpt:

This week marks a significant transition for The New York Times as we introduce digital subscriptions. It’s an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times, one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform. The change will primarily affect those who are heavy consumers of the content on our Web site and on mobile applications.

Here’s their FAQ list and the prices. As you can see, the minimum charge is $15 per month, which comes to $180 per year. That’s a lot, especially compared with free. Part of the charge is for use of smartphone or tablet apps, and they do not offer a subscription that’s web only.

Cory, at BoingBoing, doesn’t think it will work, and I agree with him. There’s bound to be confusion about how much you can see. For instance, while, according to the FAQ, you’ll always be able to read things that someone posts to a blog or that you get from a Google search, they will count against your 20 free articles a month. So if you’re not a subscriber, you can read 20 articles from the Times site, and then read 20 (or 40, or 80) more posted on someone’s blog... if you do it in that order. But if you read the articles from the 20 blog posts first and then want to snag an article directly off the Times site, you’ll have to pay. You gonna keep track of that?

Well, they say they’ll keep track of it for you, but, really, it seems a complicated mess.

Apart from that, I wonder about the links I’ve already posted. I presume that blog links will be identified in a way that the site can recognize, tagged with a token of some sort. It seems unlikely that using the referrer field that the browser sends would be reliable enough for them. But all those old Times links I’ve been posting for the last five years lack any sort of tag, so will those suddenly be blocked by the paywall? Probably, and that will be very irritating.

I also take exception to their characterization of the change as affecting primarily heavy consumers of the content on our Web site. 20 articles a month is nothing, and I would not call someone who reads one article a day a heavy consumer, in any sense. No, this will have a profound effect on the habits of a great many casual Times users, who check out a couple of items a day or so. If I want just 5 articles a month beyond the 20 free ones, I’ll have to pay $15 each month for that.

I likely won’t. I almost assuredly won’t.

So the result will be that the Times will no longer be my go-to news source for background on what I say in these pages. I’ll look to other sources instead. And I’ll do that with sadness and regret, because I think the New York Times is the best source around... and that’s the best reason I can think of for them to look for ways to fund their content other than by charging for it, article by article. They’re a business, yes, but they’re also a public service, and an important one.

Or perhaps it’s that they’re not a public service any longer. Sigh.

AOL to acquire dumpster full of garbage

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that AOL will pay $315 million for the Huffington Post, using this headline:

Betting on News, AOL Is Buying The Huffington Post

The problem here is that the HuffPo hasn’t been news in several years, if it ever was at all. I used to follow it in my feed reader, occasionally finding things of interest, but at least for the last three of its less than six years, it’s just been full of pointers to other people’s news, inane commentary, new-age silliness, quackery, and other junk. I stopped following it at all well over two years ago.

AOL apparently hasn’t. To be sure, there are things to be found there that are worth reading — I just don’t find it worth panning through the pebbles to find those few bits of pyrite, and there certainly isn’t anything that rates as gold. But with AOL’s content coming up even emptier, I guess the acquisition will be some sort of a boost, at least.

But news? Not unless something changes. Not unless Ms Huffington tosses the likes of Deepak Chopra and the other crazies that post there, and goes back to the substantive commentary that she used to have more of than now.

And it will be up to Ms H, indeed; according to the report:

Arianna Huffington, the cable talk show pundit, author and doyenne of the political left, will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group. The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.

By handing so much control over to Ms. Huffington and making her a public face of the company, AOL, which has been seen as apolitical, risks losing its nonpartisan image. Ms. Huffington said her politics would have no bearing on how she ran the new business.

Well, best of luck to AOL’s new Huffington Post Media Group, but I, at least, am more skeptical than the HuffPo has ever been.

Plagiarize! Let no one else’s work evade your eyes.

In case you haven’t been following the latest New York Times plagiarism scandal, you can get a good summary from ombudsman Clark Hoyt’s March 6th Public Editor column:

ZACHERY KOUWE, a Times business reporter for a little over a year, resigned last month after he was accused of plagiarizing from The Wall Street Journal. An internal review of his work turned up more articles — he said he was shown four — containing copy clearly lifted from other news sources.

Mr Hoyt calls for a full accounting by the Times, listing all the instances they turned up where plagiarism was clear, and telling readers what’s being done to address the situation in general, beyond the dismissal of Mr Kouwe.

For Mr Kouwe’s part, according to Mr Hoyt he expressed his own surprise at being shown what he’d done. It’s an honest mistake, he says, editing copied material in without remembering that it had been copied, thinking that it was his own writing.

I find this completely puzzling.

I’ve never worked at a news desk, and have never had the pressure, stress, competitiveness, and tight deadlines for my writing that Mr Kouwe faced, and that his colleagues still do. Perhaps it’s the pressure and deadlines that explain it. Perhaps when one is under that kind of stress, one does forget. And yet....

1. When I get source material, I keep it separate. And I never include it without attribution. Look around these pages: there’s nothing that shows up here written by someone else, unless it’s within quotation marks or in a <blockquote>. I can’t understand how a professional writer can carelessly mix up his own writing with copied material.
2. I know my own writing. Perhaps more to the point, I know what’s not my own writing. Once in a while, there’ll probably be something that could go either way, but in general I can just look at something and say, “That’s not mine; I didn’t write that.”

I want to believe Mr Kouwe when he says that it was an accident. I just find it very hard to. And, anyway, I doubt he’ll be working for any reputable news organization again. But what am I to think when the next journalist makes a similar claim?

In any case, dear readers, be assured that every sentence, clause, or phrase in these pages is my own, unless it’s clearly identified otherwise.

[Thanks to Tom Lehrer for this post’s title.]

Plagiarize!
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes.
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes.
So don’t shade your eyes,
But plagiarize! Plagiarize! Plagiarize!
(Only be sure always to call it, please, “research”.)

— Tom Lehrer, “Lobachevsky”

Hyperbo-news

Suppose that another driver cut me off on the road this morning, and I had to hit my brakes to avoid a collision. Not unusual, of course; this happens to everyone, all the time. Most of us mutter some unkind epithet. But what would you think if I should describe it by saying, “My car was almost smashed to pieces this morning!” ?

Or how about if the last time I had a head cold, after I recovered I told everyone, “I almost died last week!” ?

Well, you’d call it hyperbole, of course: obvious exaggeration for rhetorical effect. Every one of us does it seventeen million times a day.

Oops; there I go again.

So, then, how about when the news media report that on Christmas day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab “almost brought down a Northwest Airlines jetliner”? I’ve seen that and many similar statements in newspapers and on television news, over the last few days. But how close is “almost”? How far from actuality can we get before “almost” is inappropriate? And do we want the news media engaging in hyperbole?

To its credit, the New York Times isn’t using those sorts of characterizations. The Times tells us that “the man wanted to bring the plane down,” attributing that statement to federal officials. Saying that he wanted to do it is very different from saying that it almost happened. DHS officials say that what he had was “more incendiary than explosive,” and question “whether at the end of the day he had the ability to do” what he set out to.

Unfortunately, hyperbole sells, and many news outlets aren’t shy about that.

[Back when Richard Reid had his day, a friend of mine noted the new requirement to doff our shoes, and said it was a good thing he hadn’t tried to ignite his underwear, or we’d all be flying naked soon. Perhaps that’s turned out to be prophetic.]

Is carrying a gun risky?

I honestly do wish the press — even the science press — would stop reporting on preliminary studies and incomplete results. Or maybe the fault is with the scientists who talk to the press about such results, and the publicity departments of their research organizations, which put out press releases.

New Scientist, which offers a mixed bag of good science reporting and stuff that the editors should have thrown in the rubbish bin, has just given us one in the latter category: “Carrying a gun increases risk of getting shot and killed”.

Packing heat may backfire. People who carry guns are far likelier to get shot — and killed — than those who are unarmed, a study of shooting victims in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has found.

It would be impractical — not to say unethical — to randomly assign volunteers to carry a gun or not and see what happens. So Charles Branas’s team at the University of Pennsylvania analysed 677 shootings over two-and-a-half years to discover whether victims were carrying at the time, and compared them to other Philly residents of similar age, sex and ethnicity. The team also accounted for other potentially confounding differences, such as the socioeconomic status of their neighbourhood.

The result? Well:

Overall, Branas’s study found that people who carried guns were 4.5 times as likely to be shot and 4.2 times as likely to get killed compared with unarmed citizens. When the team looked at shootings in which victims had a chance to defend themselves, their odds of getting shot were even higher.

Anyone staring at these pages for a while will know that I dislike guns. I’d love nothing more than to be able to take that result at face value, and to quote it far and wide. I’d love to have a definitive study showing such statistics.

This is not that study, and these results are useful only to prompt further study. As they stand, we can’t conclude anything from them.

The article itself does point out some of the problems, but many readers will miss them. First, this is not a randomized trial, nor even a review of other scientific work. They started with people who were shot. The article points out that practicality and ethics make it difficult to assign people to groups, but perhaps a study that selected people at random and then looked at what happened to them would have a better chance. As it is, the methodology here makes confirmation bias likely.

Second, while they attempted to control for factors such as age, sex, ethnic background, and socioeconomic status, they have not controlled for some major factors, not least of which involve the attitudes and behaviours of the subjects. We can’t say this enough: correlation does not imply causation. Even if we accept that they have shown a high correlation between carrying a gun and being shot, there is no sense in which they’ve shown any cause. Again, the article does note that, but not in so many words, and only in passing.

It’s entirely possible, for example, that the causation is exactly the other way around. It’s possible — I have no data to support this; it’s just hypothetical — that the people who were carrying guns were doing so because they often go places where they’re likely to be shot.

Third, they studied a city in the northeastern U.S., which has a certain view of guns. The results could be very different in, say, Dallas, where the gun culture is very different. Geographically diverse studies would be needed to account for regional differences in how we think about guns, and in the laws that regulate them.

None of this is to say that the work isn’t good, isn’t useful. It’s just that we can’t deduce anything directly from it. The value of studies like this is that they uncover apparent correlations and show us things that we can then go off and study more rigorously.

Unfortunately, it’s likely that many people will read reports of studies like this and won’t understand the limitations on interpreting the results. And in this case, trumpeting this study at the NRA’s gates would be a mistake, because its so easy to shoot it down (if you’ll excuse the metaphor).

On the other hand, I look forward to future studies that pursue the questions this one raises.

Public misunderstanding of studies

Over at Bioephemera, Jessica Palmer agree with Language Log’s Mark Liberman in his admonition against the use of “generic plurals” in science reporting. Language Log:

This would lead us to avoid statements like “men are happier than women”, or “boys don’t respond to sounds as rapidly as do girls”, or “Asians have a more collectivist mentality than Europeans do"” — or “the brains of violent criminals are physically and functionally different from the rest of us”. At least, we should avoid this way of talking about the results of scientific investigations.

The reason? Most members of the general public don’t understand statistical-distribution talk, and instead tend to interpret such statements as expressing general (and essential) properties of the groups involved. This is especially true when the statements express the conclusions of an apparently authoritative scientific study, rather than merely someone’s personal opinion, which is easy to discount.

The problem, in case you don’t see it from what’s quoted above, is this (I’m going to make some details up, just to give an example):

Suppose some researchers do a study in which they ask people how happy they are, on a scale of 1 to 10. Suppose that they ask 50 men and 50 women, and the average happiness rating for the men is 7.3, while the average score for the women is 7.1. Now suppose that the study is reported in the news with the statement that “men are happier than women.”

Or let’s be even more straightforward: suppose the 50 men and 50 women are simply asked, “On the whole, are you happy?” 37 of the men and 36 of the women say, “Yes.” And the newspapers report that, according to a recent study, “men are happier than women.”

Of course, George reads that over his morning coffee, and says, “Hey, Martha. It says here that I’m happier than you. Ha! I always knew there was something wrong. Maybe you need some of that Prozac stuff.”

But we can’t generalize a finding based on average aspects of a group... to particular individuals in the general population. Martha may be far happier than George, and the study doesn’t say otherwise. George just doesn’t understand.

Of course, the problem isn’t limited to generic plurals with no statistics behind them. We could report that a study shows that “men are 50% more likely than women to get into traffic accidents,” but that wouldn’t mean that I am 50% more likely, just because I’m a man. There are other reasons, which the study might or might not go into, that are the causes of the difference, and the study just shows one correlation.

So it’s important to word these reports in a way that doesn’t invite that sort of misinterpretation. It’s important for a number of reasons:

• The media already often get the details wrong in reporting scientific studies. It makes it worse to compound that with confusing reporting.
• The media often highlight the wrong bits, in efforts to get catchy headlines and “interesting” copy.
• Readers don’t understand statistics, and misinterpretation is likely even when the stats are there. Don’t make it worse by eliminating them.
• Readers are prone to generalize results beyond what’s valid, and they’ll likely apply a group trent to specific individuals, as in the example above.
• Readers don’t understand the limitations of studies. Reporters should try to talk about one or two key limitations.

The first two are nicely demonstrated by the British newspaper The Telegraph. Back in June, they reported on work done by a student, Sophia Shaw, at the University of Leicester. The preliminary findings, according to Ms Shaw: “We can see from the results that sexually experienced men are more likely to coerce women in sexual situations; even more so if they believe the women to be sexually experienced.” But the Telegraph reported (the article has since been removed from their web site after the criticism of it, but you can read discussion of it) that the work “found that the skimpier the dress and the more outgoing the woman, the less likely a man was to take no for an answer.”

In The Telegraph’s competition, The Guardian, Ben Goldacre seemed to enjoy tearing the former’s report apart:

Women who drink alcohol, wear short skirts and are outgoing are more likely to be raped? “This is completely inaccurate,” Shaw said. “We found no difference whatsoever. The alcohol thing is also completely wrong: if anything, we found that men reported they were willing to go further with women who are completely sober.”

We often say that the public needs to be better educated with respect to science and critical thinking. This is a good place to start... and the news media need to be among the educators.

Blogs as journalism: what standards?

Some friends and I were having a conversation recently that seems reasonable to report on here.

A friend sent to some others of us a link to a technology column, and I, unimpressed with the column’s author, responded with some strong criticism:

Given that he’s being paid to write, it’s a pity he doesn’t write better: he misspells, he doesn’t use commas correctly, he gets subject/verb agreement and number agreement wrong, and he has awful, run-on sentences that are so convoluted even the writer can’t get the ending right. And that’s just in one article.

The sender’s response to that was that hey, it’s a blog, not the New York Times, implying that “blogs” shouldn’t be held to standards as high as those we’d hold the Times to. To which another correspondent said, “That’s one of my bigger complaints about blogs. A lot of bloggers are in dire need of an editor, not merely an author.”

The conversation finished with the sender’s noting that some blogs are “rougher hewn,” and that that’s OK, “as long as reader expectations are set and met consistently.” But there’s the thing: there are all different kinds of blogs, all different kinds of readers, and all different kinds of expectations.

There are individual blogs like this one. No pay, no pretense to journalism. Widely varying quality of writing, and the people who read them know what to expect from the ones they read. I try to maintain good writing standards, and I think I usually succeed. But it’s not something one expects when one stumbles onto a blog like this.

There are group blogs that work pretty much as individual blogs, except that there are multiple contributors. They usually vary by contributor. There are also group blogs that are more formal, and some where contributors do get paid.

And then there are “blogs” like the Huffington Post, like the “technology blogs” (one of which started this discussion), and like the blogs that are actually part of the New York Times. These are labelled as “blogs”, but they certainly aspire to “journalism”. Some are simply less-formal, less-edited columns written by actual journalists, who otherwise write formal, edited pieces for the same outlets. David Pogue, for instance, has technology columns in the Times, as well as a blog there.

Should we be applying different standards to Mr Pogue, say, depending upon whether we read his comments on www.nytimes.com or on blogs.nytimes.com ?

And back to the author in question, who is associated with a major techno-journalism outlet: is it OK for him to write badly because he has an established readership, and his readers accept it?

Ultimately, everyone’s job is to make one’s boss happy. If the people who are paying the guy are pleased, then who am I to say? And, yet, it bothers me. It bothers me that people are being paid to write, and they write badly. It bothers me to know that there are good writers out there who can’t get work, and, yet, bad writers are... making their bosses happy. It bothers me that standards of writing and of journalism are deteriorating.

It bothers me that standards seem now to be driven by what readers will tolerate, rather than by what they deserve from paid professionals.

Truth and rumour and journalism

The New York Times recently ran an item about bloggers and other online writers “competing” with mainstream journalism. A main point of the article was that news-bloggers often take more risks, do less fact-checking, worry less about reliability of sources, and so on. And the idea, it seems, is that when they miss — a “fact” isn’t, or a source turns out to have been wrong — it doesn’t matter much, because they’re “only bloggers”, but when they hit, they have a real scoop.

But seeking credibility may be a less-important strategy for the blogs at this stage. Mr. Arrington, a lawyer, is quick to point out that he has no journalism training. He is at ease, even high-minded, in explaining the decisions to print unverified rumors.

Mr. Arrington and the other bloggers see this not as rumor-mongering, but as involving the readers in the reporting process. One mission of his site, he said, is to write about the things a few people are talking about, “the scuttlebutt around Silicon Valley.” His blog will often make clear that he’s passing along a thinly sourced story.

The point is that when you consider the resources needed to do all the real, you know, journalism work, you see that the little guy can’t compete with the big media outlets... but there is, they say, a place for that little guy and his tossing out of questionable material, hoping that enough of it is right — or right enough — to have value.

I’m uncertain. It seems to me that we used to call such people “gossip columnists”, and we used that as a pejorative term. When we wanted to know what was going on in the real world, we turned to the real news and we expected reliable facts and reliable sources, news items written by reporters who took the time to investigate what they were reporting on. Breaking stories demanding urgent reporting were always different, of course, but even then we expected something with real facts.

When we wanted to know who was dating whom in Hollywood, who was on the outs and who was having whose baby, well, we were happy to turn to whispered, unsourced, unchecked innuendo, often put in the form of rhetorical questions. “And who’s that sexy blonde who’s was seen with Herkermer Biffelwogg in Cannes last month?”

And now, it seems, the latter is encroaching on the former. Now that one no longer needs a publisher to be published, now that one can be a soi-disant journalist on a whim, trained by no one and hired by no one, now that any 10-year-old with a broadband connection[1] can publish what he has to say to the world, readers, not writers, are often the ones expected to check the facts.

The Times article describes a situation where a blogger ran with a rumour (about the health of Apple’s Steve Jobs) that turned out to be right:

Mr. Lam says it taught him a lesson. “If we don’t have rumors, what do we have as journalists?” he asks. “You have press releases. So maybe there is some honor in printing rumors.”

Is that really the dichotomy: what isn’t “rumour” is just canned material released for gullible journalists to reproduce with little editing and less thought? I don’t think so. That’s clearly not what Woodward and Bernstein did with the Watergate break-in. It’s not even what Damon Darlin did for this very New York Times article. Mr Darlin neither printed someone’s press release nor pasted random rumours into his computer. He talked to people. He made some phone calls, he probably followed chains of references, he sorted and culled what he got, and he wrote an article with some though behind it.

There’s still lots of that sort of reporting out there, and it’s what I prefer to read.

I’m not sure to what extent I have any interest in rumours, but I know this: I expect to see them labeled as such. Facts, opinions, analysis, and rumours are all different things, and it needs to be clear which is which.[2]
 

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[1] I used to say, “any 10-year-old with a modem,” but, well, times have changed.

[2] In case there’s any question: I cite my sources, and everything else here is opinion, always. But, then, I also don’t claim to be a journalist.

Changes at Sci Am

I was saddened to hear about the reorganization of Scientific American magazine, which has been announced in the last few days. I just spoke with John Rennie a week ago, and got no clue that it was in the works — perhaps he didn’t know the details then, or, more likely, he wasn’t saying.

I wonder what it will do to the magazine, of course. While John will still write for the magazine and will “continue to consult [...] in some capacity,” it’s always hard to predict what changes will come from swapping out an Editor in Chief, especially one who’s been chief for as long as fifteen years.

And from the personal side, John’s a friendly and interesting guy. I hope he enjoys what comes next, and that we all profit from the result.

Equal time for nonsense?

I don’t write about the evolution/creation argument here, because many people are covering it far better than I would, and I find it tedious. Incessant arguing among people who will fail to convince each other of anything reminds me too much, sometimes, of other pursuits than this blog. But there’s one aspect of it that I do want to say something about.

Eric Rescorla, over at Educated Guesswork, comments about a BBC radio programme, called Heart and Soul, that gave equal time to a real scientist and a young-Earth creationist:

In this second programme we hear from Dr Henry Morris III. He is Executive vice President of the Institute for Creation Research, founded by his father. He believes a literal interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis, suggesting that the Earth, life and humans were created over six days less than 10,000 years ago.

Not to go all PZ Myers on you here, but this is nuts. As far as I can tell, Morris indeed believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, but, put simply, he’s wrong. Yes, it’s true that a bunch of other people agree with him, but they’re wrong too. Yes, yes, it’s of course possible that the entire universe was created with fake evidence of age, but there’s no evidence for this whatsoever absent Morris’s preexisting religious commitments. We might as well consider the possibility that the world sits on the back of an invisible turtle. So, while I don’t dispute Morris’s right to believe what he believes, it would be great if the media would stop acting like it’s in any sense epistemically valid.

Eric gets the key point in his final sentence: no matter who believes it, the media do not have the responsibility to give it credence, and for them to do so debases them and abdicates their true responsibility.

I’ve talked before (and here) about the media’s habit of taking misguided steps toward “fairness”. While there may always be two sides to every argument, it’s not always the case that everything each side says is equally valid. In the case of the second link above, the media should be using the accepted medical term for a medical procedure, and should refuse to use an emotionally charged term that opponents made up for the purpose of deprecating the practice. Using the contrived term begs the question, very much like “How long have you been beating your wife?” does.

The entry in the first link suggests that the media stop publishing false statements with the notation that the subject denies them. They should check their facts, and refuse to give “ink” to claims that don’t check out. That is how they best serve their consumers.

Where does that put us in this case? I think it’s reasonable to tell people that some folks believe certain things, beyond all evidence. But it’s not reasonable for media outlets that base their reporting on verifiable facts to treat these beliefs as equal to conclusions drawn from evidence. We can find people with all manner of degrees and titles who support any side of any argument... the fact that they have degrees and titles doesn’t make them right, doesn’t make their beliefs true, and doesn’t make what they say newsworthy.

If a young-Earth creationist, with or without a title, should come up with evidence for his belief that can stand up to scientific scrutiny, that would be news. I would want to see that. Any scientist would want to see that. And if it continued to hold up, we’d have to re-evaluate our explanations for how things are.

But repetition of the standard talking points, none of which hold any water unless you close your eyes and believe them, is not news, not a second side of the argument, not an opposing viewpoint, not something that deserves equal time in the interest of fairness.

Young-Earth creationism is just made-up nonsense, and the media have no business giving it any credibility.

The interview

President Obama did an interview on Al Arabiya, and the interview was aired on Tuesday. You can watch it on You Tube: part 1; part 2.

Of course, the right-wing idiots have wasted no time before blasting him for appearing on Arabic television and talking to Muslims. Read the comment thread, if you can do it without retching from the illiteracy and the wingnuttery. Try these, for example:

I knew it obama is off to his new friends the muslims

Last week he refused to answer a question from FOX News (?) regargding lobbyists in his administration; this week he scheduled time for a television interview with Al-Arabiya.

The previous president, of course, would never have done such a thing as give an interview on Al Arabiya. Never! [Eh? What’s that? Oh, um...] Well, OK, he actually did so six times. Imagine that.

OK, enough about that. What’d he say?

He opened it by saying that George Mitchell will “start by listening,” rather than “start by dictating.” Listen to both sides. Find out what they need. Come back and work out a response. Not telling them what to do, but mediating and helping them negotiate.

He said that we can’t just think about the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. There’s also Syria and Iran and Lebanon and Afghanistan and Pakistan. “These things are interrelated.” He talked of “communicating a message to the Arab world and the Muslim world that we are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest.”

Speaking of Al Qaeda, “There’s no actions that they’ve taken that, say, a child in the Muslim world is getting a better education because of them, or has better health care because of them.” He brought out a quote from his inauguration speech, “You will be judged on what you build, not what you destroy.” He gives the Muslim world credit for recognizing that “that path is leading no place except more death and destruction.”

Other sound bites:
“the Americans are not your enemy”
“what you’ll see is somebody who is listening, who is respectful”
“a drawdown of troops in Iraq, so that Iraqis can start taking more responsibility”
“the language we use matters”
“to the broader Muslim world, what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship.”

Notably, President Obama has avoided inflammatory phrases and sabre-rattling rhetoric such as “war on terror,” phrases that draw cheers at rallies but that are empty on inspection. Instead, he talks in specifics. And we’ll be able to see the results, one way or the other.

The more I see this sort of thing, the more pride I have that we’ve elected someone who can lead the country out of the hole it was pulled into in the last eight years. This is a good interview, and it will make a difference in how we’re perceived, and, thus, in the cooperation we get in pursuit of peace and stability.

Good riddance to a bad column

When William Kristol was given a regular column on the New York Times’s op-ed pages, there was a lot of criticism of the decision from us readers. A conservative columnist on a liberal op-ed page? What were they thinking?

But, really, having a conservative column to read isn’t a bad thing. One needs an opposing viewpoint to consider. One needs thoughtful opinions from the other side. I read George Will, sometimes, for example, and I used to enjoy a good William F. Buckley column when he was alive, whether or not I agreed with what he had to say.

No, the galling part was the choice of Mr Kristol, a “Fox News” type of conservative. William Kristol isn’t Michelle Malkin, say, nor Ann Coulter, either of whom would have taken them beyond the brink. But neither is he the sort of columnist I’d expect to find with a contrasting point of view that I’d want to read.

And so I was not surprised when he wasn’t. His columns haven’t been insightful nor entertaining. He hasn’t had anything to say that was worth the print space or the Internet bandwidth to carry it. The experiment was every bit as silly as I thought it’d be.

I am, therefore, happy to see that it’s coming to an end. William Kristol has written his last regular column for the New York Times.

And that last column is as useless as the ones that came before it. He praises Ronald Reagan for putting conservatism back in front of the country. He hopes that Barack Obama will bring in a conservative liberalism that he — Mr Kristol — can live with. Blather, blather, blather.

The Times won’t say what they’ll do about replacing his pen with another conservative one. They’ll only say that they have “some interesting plans.”

That they may. In any case, I won’t miss William Kristol’s column at all.

Hadrons and black holes and fear...

...Oh, my!

Everyone’s heard, by now, the fears that operation of the Large Hadron Collider (henceforth, “LHC”) could result in the formation of a black hole that would suck the Earth into oblivion. Everyone knows, by now, that the LHC has been switched on and “the Earth is still here, ha-ha!” And everyone’s seen, by now, the rebuttal that it’s been switched on, but it’s not fully operational yet. The fears are still there that the annihilation of the Earth (and who knows what-all else, but we don’t much care beyond that) still waits for spring, somewhere within 27 kilometres of underground tubes near Geneva.

The other weekend, the radio program Studio 360 (produced by WNYC and distributed by Public Radio International) re-aired a couple of segments from late May. Physicist Tara Shears, a research fellow at the University of Liverpool, took the interviewer on a tour of the LHC. Dr Shears is well used to explaining the LHC to the media, and does her usual wonderful job here.

Next, physicist and writer Janna Levin talked about the LHC and other things, and specifically addressed the question of the fears. About the fears, Dr Levin says this (about 20:35 into the audio), after we heard some related fiction by a novelist:

Kurt Andersen: I want to return now to Janna Levin, an actual scientist. I asked her about the chances that this new gadget might actually create a black hole on Earth.

Janna Levin: Well, it’s interesting, ’cause you can never say “never,” actually, and the best things you can say are that it’s incredibly, ridiculously, extremely unlikely that anything like that can happen. But you have to remember that in these quantum laws it is physically possible for me to pass through that wall without destroying either myself or the wall. And, yet, none of us fear that it’s going to happen, that we’re going to fall through the floor. We all take elevators, and we live our lives all the time, because this probability is so absurdly low that it’s never really going to be observed in our lifetime. But can I say it’s a physical impossibility? I can not.

The fear and hysteria is very interesting, because actually, we have a lot of very dangerous technology that’s very simple, like, you know, fire. And it’s really hard to imagine going through life prohibiting certain advances on the basis of very absurd fear.

KA: No, but apocalypse... I mean, the down side is big!

JL: Yeah, the down side is big. There are particles that are hitting the Earth’s atmosphere right now that have those energies and higher, and there are not little black holes being created in the atmosphere.

As I listened to that, what occurred to me was the difference between the way Dr Levin and scientists in general talk about things, and how religious fundamentalists and other wingnuts do. It’s a difference that makes it difficult for us to understand each other, and difficult for others to sort the arguments out.

Let’s be clear about what Dr Levin is saying: We know that the LHC is not going to destroy the Earth. We know it as surely as we know that we can’t walk through walls, as surely as we know that the Sun will come up tomorrow, as surely as we know which direction a dropped stone will fall. There’s not really any question there. But scientists work with observed and measured data, and hypotheses that explain the data. New data can come along that will change our explanations or reveal new aspects of the world that we previously weren’t aware of.

So we say we can’t be 100% certain. We call things “theories” and “hypotheses”. We say things like, “to the best of our knowledge,” and, “our evidence tells us.”

The religious fundamentalists, on the other hand, have no such doubts. With no observable evidence, guided by a book and belief, they “know”. They are 100% certain.

The scientist will say that the probability that you could walk through a wall safely is minuscule, but it could happen, if the respective atomic particles happened to line up just so. A religious view wouldn’t worry about probabilities or minuscule chance: you could walk through a wall if and only if God wanted you to do it. Simple. Certain. It’s all up to God.

We could dismiss that, but for one thing: most people don’t understand the scientists’ “uncertainty” for what it is. Most people have the same reaction that Kurt Andersen did, when they hear that uncertainty: “But you aren’t sure. What if you’re wrong? The down side is big!”

And it’s that natural reaction that lets the fearmongers get a foothold. “The scientists say the chances are small and we shouldn’t worry, but they don’t know. If they’re wrong, the Earth will be destroyed. We must make them stop this madness!”

As scientists, we have to address this difference in how we talk about things. We have to convey the certainty that we understand in words that our listeners and readers will understand. Gravity will always pull things down. Evolution is true. The LHC will not create an Earth-enveloping black hole. No uncertainty. No probabilities. No theories.

We need to save the “what ifs” and the ultra-remote possibilities for the academic papers.

The veeps have at it

In the spirit of my post the other day, as I talk about last night’s debate I want to keep it to the substance. I’m finding it hard, though, because I find her accent, her manner, her expressions (“doggone it” and “you betcha”, for example), her mispronunciations (“eye-raq”, “eye-ran”, “noo-kya-lar”[1]), and her whiny voice to be so annoying that it’s hard to sit and listen, to pay attention, and not to run, screaming, from the room.

I actually think she did pretty well. She was certainly far better prepared than she had been for either Charles Gibson or Katie Couric, the latter having been a total disaster.

That said, she spent her time spewing talking points and making every fifth word either “John McCain” or “maverick”. I didn’t get any new information from her, and she repeated a bunch of the usual lies. For example, she gave the standard claim that Barack Obama voted against funding the troops, a shameful thing that John McCain would never do. Senator Biden corrected that, pointing out that John McCain also voted against that bill, and that it was because of the other stuff tacked onto the bill (in McCain’s case, the withdrawal timeline). For example, she said that John McCain’s health care plan is “budget neutral” because it’s gives a $5000 tax credit to people to use for buying medical insurance. Say what? How does taking $5000 per person of tax money away not affect the budget. Senator Biden cleared that up.

She often didn’t answer the questions given to her, but instead addressed the points that she’d planned to make. Unfortunately, Ms Ifill didn’t hold Ms Palin to the questions. In fact, there was one point where Ms Palin explicitly said that she was not going to answer the question, but had her own stuff to say. And she was allowed to.

One key question that she ducked was whether she would put no restrictions on the rights of same-sex couples. The two agreed that they would not support “marriage” here (sigh), but while Senator Biden clearly said that he would have homosexual couples treated exactly the same as heterosexual ones in law and civil rights, Governor Palin only said that she’s “tolerant” of homosexual couples, and gave a couple of examples of things they should be allowed to do (enter into contracts as couples, have hospital “family” visitation rights). When Mr Biden said it seemed they agreed, and Ms Ifill pressed her to confirm that, she did not, but instead repeated her more limited stand. I bet many people didn’t notice the dodge.

It seemed to me that Senator Biden answered the questions more rigorously, and I didn’t find myself throwing any, “But he didn’t answer the question!” bricks at the TV. He corrected Ms Palin when he could, though the format didn’t always allow that.

Of course, he, too, came with talking points, which he fit in as he could. And he, too, mentioned the top of his ticket quite often, though more so at the beginning than later.

I did like the part where Mr Biden had about had it with the “maverick” thing, and spent a couple of minutes pointing out how un-maverick-like Senator McCain has been.

While he addressed the moderator’s questions more directly, and was less obviously parroting talking points, I have to say that I didn’t get any useful information from him either. It’s all the same stuff we’ve been hearing over and over again. The only purpose of this “debate” was to see if Sarah Palin could avoid falling on her face, and she succeeded in not doing so. Apart from that, it was 90 minutes of nothing.

I will add that both candidates were respectful to each other.

I’ll also add that I continue to be amazed that the media are allowing Sarah Palin to keep saying that the McCain/Palin ticket represents a change from “Washington insiders”, when John McCain has been in Congress for almost 26 years and is in no sense an “outsider”. They really need to start calling bullshit on that line, and stop letting the campaign get away with it.
 

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[1] On “noo-kya-lar”, I’d really like to hear from a speech therapist, because I figure there has to be something truly hard about that for some people. It’s not just the Bad Guys who say it that way; in addition to Bush and Palin, Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale also said “noo-kya-lar”, and Carter even has a physics degree and studied nuclear power. I have to think that if it were easy to fix this pronunciation, at least one of those people would have.

Going to the candidates’ debate

I watched Friday night’s “debate”. I hadn’t planned to, but I did. What I saw was actually better than I’d expected: a set of core questions that each candidate had two minutes of uninterrupted time to address — and they generally did address the questions at hand, despite not having known in advance what they would be (though none were real surprises), and time with each question to discuss and rebut. It was almost like a proper debate, certainly more so than others in recent years.

I was very surprised by Senator McCain’s manner. Senator Obama came across as confident, secure, and presidential, while Senator McCain just appeared to be lame, not at all in control and not specific enough in his answers. I was puzzled.

Then I read James Hanley’s analysis of what purpose the debates serve (written Friday morning, but I hadn’t had time to read it and it sat in a browser tab until Saturday), and he hits the problem exactly with this:

That stuff just doesn’t give you any idea who would be a more capable president, so it doesn’t help anyone make an informed decision.

And of course the mass media almost solely focuses on who “won” and who “lost” the debates, treating them as wholly self-contests, with little regard for what they really reveal—if anything—about a candidate’s presidential qualifications. And winning is a wholly relative term, based on how the candidates are expected to perform. You don’t have to do well to win, you just have to do better than expected, which means that if you’re expected to be a clueless dolt, you can win just by not misprouncing “nucular” too badly. That’s why we get the candidates’ campaigns doing their best to create very low expectations.

Well, yes, of course. That’s it. High school debate teams “win” or “lose” their debates on how they’ve put together and conducted their arguments, and they are assigned different sides of an issue to debate. In those debates, the participants score points, and we tally them... but that’s not what these debates are supposed to be about.

These are supposed to be telling us where the candidates stand on the issues of the day, and giving them a chance to challenge each other’s stand right there in front of us. And, in fact, this debate did much more of that than most others have done.

And yet as soon as it was over, I started seeing things pop up in the news media and in the blogs... telling us who “won” on each question, and overall. But it’s not a question of winning and losing; it’s a question of giving you and me the information we need in order to choose between them in the election. Senator Obama might have appeared more in control of the question about the economy, but if you don’t agree with his plan, that’s what matters. Senator McCain may have succeeded in beating Senator Obama up for being willing to “sit across the table” from Iranian President Ahmadinejad, saying that doing so “legitimizes” everything the latter has said... but if you think that’s a ridiculous bucket of hog-spittle, has he “won” that question?

If we really want informed voters, both the voters and the news media have to stop trying to bring everything down to a check mark in one column or another. It’s not black and white, it’s not sound bites, it’s not a zero-sum game.[1] It’s a complex set of issues, and we have to think about them. And the media have to help get us the information we really need to think about.

Laugh about it, shout about it,
When you’ve got to choose;
Every way you look at it, you lose.

— Paul Simon, “Mrs Robinson”

 

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[1] Well, the election is a zero-sum game, of course. But the issues, and the candidates’ and voters’ views on them aren’t.

On foreign policy and moose

On Thursday’s Morning Edition, NPR aired items about McCain and Palin in Michigan and Obama in Nevada (pronounce the first “a” as in “dad”, not as in “pa”, if you want to wow the Nevadans). In the Michigan segment was this bit, from a “town hall meeting” in Grand Rapids:

NPR’s David Greene: One question at last night’s town hall came from Kimberly King:

Kimberly King: Governor Palin, there has been quite a bit of discussion about your perceived lack of foreign policy experience. I want to give you your chance: If you could please respond to that criticism and give us specific skills that you think you have to bring to the White House to rebut that or mitigate that concern.

Sarah Palin: Well, I think because I’m a Washington outsider, that, uh, that opponents are going to be looking for a whole lot of things that they can criticize, and they can kind of try to beat the candidate, here, who chose me as his partner to, um, kind of tear down the ticket. But as for foreign policy, you know, I think that I am prepared, and I know that on January 20th if we are so blessed as to be sworn into office as your president and vice president, certainly we’ll be ready, I’ll be ready, I have that confidence, I have that readiness. And if you want specifics, with specific policy or countries, go ahead and, and you can ask me, you can, you can play Stump the Candidate if you want to. Um. But we are ready to serve.

Right. In other words, “No, Kimberly, nothing specific. Sorry. But I have that readiness, bless me, I do.”

Ugh.

Suppose you were, say, having your kitchen re-done from the ground up, and someone wanted to do the design and contracting for you. Only, she’d never designed a kitchen before, never contracted with builders, and wasn’t really even aware of what sorts of cabinets and countertops were available, except for that time she flipped through a catalogue while she waited at the Home Depot. But, she assures you, being an outsider is actually a benefit, and if she’s blessed with your business she has that confidence and readiness.

Ya think you’d hire her?

I certainly wouldn’t.

But let’s not forget that George H.W. Bush got elected with Dan “Potatoe” Quayle at his side. Anything can happen. So let’s be clear about why the country and the world will be better off if we’re “blessed” with Barack Obama in the White House, and make sure that that gets at least as much press.

 

While we’re at it: I’m getting irritated by how the media, even NPR, are going on about the “moose hunter” and “hockey mom” stuff, just parroting advertising copy from the McCain campaign. It’s not news and it’s not relevant, and by continuing to cover it, even in an attempt to add humour, they’re giving credibility to it and acting as sock puppets for the campaign. (On the other hand, NPR also added this stand-up routine of Woody Allen’s, from 1960. Funny, if a bit dated.)

 

Oh, and also while we’re here, we should give link love to The Palin Truth Squad. Lovely satire up front with real, important information behind it; click forthwith.

Double-dipping blogger loses a dip

Michael Tunison, a blogger — until recently — for the Washington Post, has also been blogging pseudonymously for a sports blog. He outed himself and made some less-than-positive comments about his official employer, resulting in the “until recently” bit: the WaPo sacked him. It’s not that there was a real conflict between his writing for one and his writing for the other, but not being up front with your boss, and then pissing your boss off, to boot, is not a wise course of action.

Here are the comments on the situation by Tobin Harshaw of the NY Times, and Liz Wolgemuth of US News and World Report.

My opinion on the matter is probably coloured by the not-so-long-ago action against music critic Tim Page for his private comments to noted crack addict and general municipal embarrassment Marion Barry. When Mr Barry made those private comments public, the Post should have supported Mr Page’s right to say private things, but instead they joined in criticizing him.

And so with this: Mr Tunison should probably have known that his employer is conservative in this regard, and should certainly have discussed with his editor the fact that he was blogging around. And he shouldn’t have said things in his second gig that didn’t reflect so well on his first one. Even so, it doesn’t seem that he didn’t anything worth being fired over.

But, then, as Ms Wolgemuth says in her comments:

I’m not sure whether this is a new point of friction where old and new media chafe, or if this is an old-fashioned HR story, where an employer finds an employee’s judgment is at odds with, or threatens, the integrity of its brand. Perhaps it is a bit of both.

Whichever be the case, my respect for the Washington Post’s management continues to wane, despite the quality of the paper’s journalism.
 

In related news, Brazil, it seems, is coming down bloggers that don’t toe the line: With Guns and Fines, Brazil Takes On Loggers

Wait, wait... that says "loggers". Not "bloggers", "loggers". Oh. That’s very different. Never mind.

In a manner of misspeaking

Hillary Clinton’s had a minor kerfuffle this week. It seems that, to support her claim to more experience than Barack Obama, she told a bit of a tale:

BLUE BELL, Pa. — As part of her argument that she has the best experience and instincts to deal with a sudden crisis as president, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton recently offered a vivid description of having to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire after landing in Bosnia as first lady in 1996.

Now, I, for one, would not think someone more nor less qualified to lead the country, simply on the basis of her having been shot at. That may be a dramatic story, but it’s... well, it’s just irrelevant, isn’t it?

It’s also not true. And it didn’t take long for footage and photos, like the one at the right from the New York Times (click to enlarge), of a calm arrival to show up and refute her story. The camera, it is said, does not lie (though we can do amazing things with Photoshop these days, but never mind), and Senator Clinton had to admit that she did. Lie.

Mrs. Clinton corrected herself at a meeting with the Philadelphia Daily News editorial board; she did not explain why she had misspoken, but only admitted it and then offered a less dramatic description.

Mrs. Clinton said she had been told “that we had to land a certain way and move quickly because of the threat of sniper fire,” not that actual shots were being fired.

“So I misspoke,” she said.

Of course, she doesn’t really have to “explain why she had misspoken”; the reason is clear. It leaves us wondering, though, how she imagined she wouldn’t be caught at it, and that leads us down the long, winding Misspeakippi River.

Not terribly long ago, Alberto Gonzales, then Attorney General, lied about being involved in the firings of federal prosecutors (from 19 April, 2007):

In recent weeks, Mr. Gonzales has carefully shifted his public remarks from at first denying that he was involved in any discussions related to the ousters to acknowledging that he had misspoke and that he might have participated in several conversations or meetings.

During the Abu Ghraib scandal, Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, lied about the abuse of prisoners in the custody of American troops (from 28 August, 2004):

But on Thursday, in an interview with a radio station in Phoenix, Mr. Rumsfeld, who was traveling outside Washington this week, said, “I have not seen anything thus far that says that the people abused were abused in the process of interrogating them or for interrogation purposes.” A transcript of the interview was posted on the Pentagon’s Web site on Friday. Mr. Rumsfeld repeated the assertion a few hours later at a news conference in Phoenix, adding that “all of the press, all of the television thus far that tried to link the abuse that took place to interrogation techniques in Iraq has not yet been demonstrated.” [...]

On Friday, the chief Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, sought to play down Mr. Rumsfeld’s comments, saying: “He misspoke, pure and simple. But he corrected himself.”

In a particularly amusing use of the word, we have this statement from Alberto Fernandez, then a director in the State Department (from 23 October, 2006):

In the 35-minute interview, Mr. Fernandez, who speaks Arabic fluently, said, “History will decide what role the United States played.” According to a translation by CNN, he said that while the United States had tried its best, its role might be criticized by future historians “because undoubtedly there was arrogance and stupidity from the United States in Iraq.” Other news sources have translated the remarks in a similar way.

[...]

In a statement released Sunday night by the State Department, Mr. Fernandez said:

“Upon reading the transcript of my appearance on Al Jazeera, I realized that I seriously misspoke by using the phrase ‘There has been arrogance and stupidity by the U.S. in Iraq.’ This represents neither my views, or those of the State Department. I apologize.”

Hm, “misspoke”, eh? Like he could have said something like that by accident? One can just see his bosses telling him to “take it back and say you’re sorry!”

Of course, the river has two banks, and there’s misspeaking on both sides of it. in 1995, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, told us that CIA financing of Guatemalan military intelligence had stopped, when it hadn’t. He then admitted that he’d lied (from 4 April, 1995):

The Clinton Administration conceded tonight that money was still flowing from the Central Intelligence Agency to Guatemala’s military intelligence services and said that the bulk of those payments would be suspended immediately. Senior officials said that Secretary of State Warren Christopher misspoke when he said on Sunday that the payments had ceased.

[...]

On Sunday, Mr. Christopher, speaking on the CBS News program “Face the Nation,” declined three times to give a “yes or no” answer to questions about C.I.A. financing before finally asserting that he was confident that such payments had ceased.

“I’m satisfied there’s no money going down there now, that’s right,” Mr. Christopher said.

While one can, surely, pick the wrong word here and there — suppose Mrs Clinton had said that she’d dodged bullets in Bosnia in 1969, when she meant 1996 — or get a fact wrong by accident — if, say, she’d talked about arriving in Sarajevo, rather than Tuzla — that’s not what folks usually mean when they say they “misspoke”.

They usually mean they lied.

They mean that they tried to hide the truth, and they got caught.

Now, I don’t expect to hear public figures admitting that. But it’d be nice to see the media call them on it. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman used that waffle word in a column from October, 2004:

“As a result of the American military,“ President Bush declared last week, “the Taliban is no longer in existence.”

It’s unclear whether Mr. Bush misspoke, or whether he really is that clueless.

Mr Krugman misspoke. He should have said straight out that either Mr Bush is entirely clueless, or he was lying. In an op-ed column leading up to the 2004 presidential election, that was what people needed to see, in black and white.

Let’s ban the word “misspoke” from the mainstream media. It’s too easy to shrink behind it and not address the fact that our leaders are lying to us. Call it what it is.