Megan McArdle and I co-wrote
an op-ed on that
Detroit Free Press map of median household income. The opening line: "It often gets dicey for readers when journalists, who are rarely math majors, play with numbers and then publish misleading or mistaken conclusions."
As somebody who's been reading the Free Press since the late 60's, and spent a great deal of that time in a futile effort to get them to issue corrections for their numerous, politically loaded errors of fact, I had to laugh when I read that, "But it is more likely ignorance than malice." line.
ReplyDeleteHonest journalists are willing to correct errors. Did you get a correction out of them, once you'd erased their ignorance?