Yale Professor Ray Fair’s Prediction of a 57.5% George Bush Landslide and How the New York Times Reports the Story
The first part of the piece by Deborah Solomon is straightforward (answers in bold):
As a professor of economics at Yale, you are known for creating an econometric equation that has predicted presidential elections with relative accuracy.
My latest prediction shows that Bush will receive 57.5 percent of the two-party votes.
The polls are suggesting a much closer race.
Polls are notoriously flaky this far ahead of the election, and there is a limit to how much you want to trust polls.
Why should we trust your equation, which seems unusually reductive?
It has done well historically. The average mistake of the equation is about 2.5 percentage points.
So far, so good. But now, from the questioning, we learn quite a bit more than I, for one, wish to know about Ms. Solomon. Here are some of her further questions and comments:
But the country hasn’t been this polarized since the 60’s, and voters seem genuinely engaged by social issues like gay marriage and the overall question of a more just society….
It saddens me that you teach this to students at Yale, who could be thinking about society in complex and meaningful ways….
Are you a Republican?
I don’t want to do game theory. I just want to know if you are a Kerry supporter.
In response to being told that Professor Fair supports Kerry, we get this:
I believe you entirely, although I’m a little surprised, because your predictions implicitly lend support to Bush….
But in the process you are shaping opinion. Predictions can be self-confirming, because wishy-washy voters might go with the candidate who is perceived to be more successful.
I get it now. Reporting something that is positive for Bush is bad. Now I understand why Adam Nagourney buries pro-Bush polling data deep inside stories like this one. The Times has a mission to protect the weak-minded from the nasty Republicans, so that they can become “genuinely engaged by social issues like gay marriage” perhaps.
Hat tips on the above to Brothers Judd and Just One Minute.
The editors are of course much worse than the reporters. Ms. Solomon may be appalling, but the editor who let her put these questions into her story is worse. He saw nothing wrong in them. Their bias did not register; indeed, he would undoubtedly say: what bias?
Everyone, dahling, knows that people are just consumed with gay marriage. And if someone votes Republican, perhaps he is “wishy-washy” and simply attracted to Osama’s strong horse. And those tenured professors at Yale, how sad that they teach their fields of expertise, rather than “thinking about society in complex and meaningful ways.”
Here in the blogosphere, we’re all a bit puffed up, and rightfully so, about the Gotterdamerung going on in the elite political press. Thomas Lifson, Powerline, etc. And why not? Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded for stories smaller than Ed Morrissey’s exposure of the David Alston/John Kerry scam.
Here’s a prediction (I seem to make one in every post): when the polls start showing a significant Bush lead in the next month or so, then the NYT and the WaPo will begin reporting Chistmas in Cambodia. Their angle will be this: the whisper campaign of the SwiftVets to discredit John Kerry’s character is the most successful and unethical such effort since “Ma Ma, where’s my pa?” in the 1884 Cleveland/Blaine election. The irony that it is a “whisper campaign” because they have previously failed to report important news will be lost on them entirely.