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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (31510)	1/15/2009 5:43:48 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 71588

Re: "Right or wrong, as you've pointed out multiple times, it means that comparisons to years before 1967 are problematic." Well... that's what happens whenever big changes to the rule book are made. Unless one is very careful to account for all the changes and factor them out when attempting comparisons across differing time periods... then comparisons would become bogus. That is the main problem have with most of our news media. Not any perceived inherent 'biases'... bias is easy to handle and work-around for any sophisticated consumer of news. (One way is simply to balance your intake of 'news' to make sure you are getting an ample helping on your plate of bias from all angles.) No, my main problem is the general level of INCOMPETENCE in the media, the laziness and group-think and shallowness of thought and the lack of specialist knowledge in many, many areas of information. It's not 'bias' that I find so pernicious (bias can be more like a spice, a flavor), it's the LOW GRADE of competence that is the greatest danger. Such as this one small area: 'government unemployment statistics' (or... pick any other, your favorite, government-supplied statistic....) Just HOW MANY big headlines have been run over many, many years, mentioning some latest government unemployment estimate --- wherein the article direct comparisons were made to prior national periods and the 'unemployment level' then... yet the shallow-thinking authors and editors NEVER ONCE bothered to point-out for their readers to see that the 'comparison' they were breathlessly making was complete and utter CRAP... because they had fallen victim to the simplest and most common of all statistical errors: failing to correct for different independent variables?