Hold That Headline and Get Me Rewrite

October 25, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s a headline and first two paragraphs from a Reuter’s story today.

Obama lead on McCain
slips to 9 points

Sat Oct 25, 2008 1:05am EDT

By Andrew Quinn

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama's lead over Republican rival John McCain fell slightly to 9 points, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released Saturday, the second consecutive day the race has narrowed.

Obama leads McCain by 51 percent to 42 percent in the rolling three-day tracking poll, which has a margin of error of 2.9 points. Obama led by 10 points Friday and 12 points on Thursday.

Does the press really know so little about statistics? Or is it just that they work on the assumption that change is more newsworthy than stability.

Here, thanks to Pollster, are several polls all taken in the same two or three days this week. You could pick any two and claim an ominious slip or optimistic gain for either candidate.

The trouble is, your story won’t get noticed as much if it has a headline like this.

Latest Polls Show Usual
Variation Due to Sampling Error

To Spite Its Face

October 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Virginia GOP sent out a mailer with the application for an absentee ballot. As you’d expect, the messages were all about the threat of terror, the only issue that might help McCain. To make it especially persuasive, they finished with this scary photo.


I guess we’d better look evil in the eye because apparently we’ve already cut off its nose. As the saying goes, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your terrorists, but you can’t pick your terrorist’s nose, at least not if you've Photoshopped it away.

TalkingPointsMemo has all five pages of the mailer. Hat tip also to Photoshop Disasters.

McCain - GI Specialist?

October 23, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Frankly, I’m puzzled. Here’s a guy at a McCain rally in North Carolina holding up a homemade sign that says, “McCain – The Best Cure for Your Colon.”


I must be hopelessly out of touch, but I’m clueless.

Any ideas?

I found the picture at the website of the Fayetteville Observer a few days ago. The same issue reported that at an Obama rally, several cars had their tires slashed, presumably by people Sarah Palin would refer to as “real Americans.”

Grades and Booze and Graphs -- Gee Whiz

October 21, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Drinking lowers your GPA. So do smoking, spending time on the computer, and probably other forms of moral dissolution. That’s the conclusion of a survey of 10,000 students in Minnesota.

Inside Higher Ed reported it, as did the Minnesota press with titles like “Bad Habits = Bad Grades.” Chris Uggen reprints graphs of some of the “more dramatic results” (that’s the report’s phrase, not Chris’s). Here’s a graph of the effects of the demon rum.


Pretty impressive . . . if you don’t look too closely. But note: the range of the y-axis is from 3.0 to 3.5.

I’ve blogged before about “gee whiz” graphs , and I guess I’ll keep doing so as long as people keep using them. Here are the same numbers, but the graph below scales them on the traditional GPA scale of 0 to 4.0.


The difference is real – the teetotalers have a B+ average, heaviest drinkers a B. But is it dramatic?

I also would like finer distinctions in the independent variable, but maybe that’s because my glass of wine with dinner each night, six or seven a week, puts me in the top category with the big boozers. I suspect that the big differences are not between the one-drink-a-day students and the teetotalers but between the really heavy drinkers – the ones who have six drinks or more in a sitting, not in a week– and everyone else.