Thursday, January 20, 2005

Maureen Dowd and bias at the NY Times

Today's Marueen Dowd column contains nothing but vicious mean spirited attacks against Bush Administration members, basically calling all of them stupid but without offering any sort of intelligent analsysis or commentary.

David Brooks, the lone conservative columnist at the NY Times, would never devote a whole column to nothing but insults. I don't even think he could get away with it if he tried.

We have here yet another example of bias at the NY Times. To balance out Dowd they should bring in a Rush Limbaugh-like columnist to insult the left in the manner that Dowd insults the right.

6 comments:

mikeca said...

Why do you think this? Since when are editorial pages suppose to be “fair and balanced.” If you read the Wall Street Journal editorial page, it can hardly be described as balanced commentary.

I don’t believe that editorial pages should be required to present balanced viewpoints. If you don’t like the New York Times editorial page, don’t read it. Go read the WSJ editorial page. I believe you can read the WSJ editorial page online without a subscription. I read the hardcopy version.

navasink said...

All you have to do is look atthe last four years to see the reasoning behind Ms Dowd's column.
The conservative columnists (Brooks isn't the only one) easliy balance Ms. Dowd and Mr. Krugman.

Old Blind Dog said...

mikeca said:

"Why do you think this?"

What part of "without offering any sort of intelligent analsysis or commentary" don't you understand Mike?

David Foster said...

From the Dowd column:

"If you multiply 1,370 dead soldiers times zero weapons of mass destruction, that equals zero achievement for Ms Rice..."

Why would you *multiply* these things? If you were trying to create an index of goodness or badness, you would divide...for example, automobile-passenger-miles divided by automobile-accidents would be an index for goodness for auto safety. Passenger-miles *times* accidents would be a meaningless number.

If Dowd is going to use math as a metaphor to put people down, maybe she'd better learn something about it.

photoncourier.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

You should welcome this kind of nonsense. It creates a demand for bloggers.

David Foster said...

You would only have zero in the denominator if the number of "bad things" being measured was, in fact, zero...so the indicator goes to infinity as bad things goes to zero, which is exactly what one would want in an indicator of goodness.

In any event, this is the way people actually calculate indices: using ratios. Data is published on "accidents per million passenger-miles" or "million passenger-miles per accident"...you're not likely to see any indicators with the product of "accidents" and "passenger-miles" because it wouldn't make sense.

photoncourier.blogspot.com