More bad journalism (and bad science)

Earlier this week, I wrote (okay, ranted) about how brutally skewed and factually inaccurate much of the media rhetoric surrounding the Wisconsin teachers' union situation has been and continues to be (side note: yesterday's Republican maneuver was definitely a somewhat dirty manipulation of the political process, but so too was the Democrats' decision to flee the state--this is what happens when politicians negotiate in bad faith and try to exploit legal technicalities...it's bad news for all concerned).

In that post, I took a few shots at my old favorite punching bag on the left, Paul Krugman. Now, if I spent all of my time on this blog talking about bad journalism from politically-skewed publications and writers, I'd never write about anything else. But when bad journalism and bad science come together, I can't help myself. So, in the name of promoting good science (and also political neutrality), I'm going to balance out my Krugman rant with a similar diatribe against the "Bible of the right", the Weekly Standard. In a blog post that was teased on the Drudge Report, Mark Hemingway wrote:

Ah, January of 2009. Hope was in the air, but more importantly, gas was under two dollars a gallon. Since then gas prices, have gone up 67 percent and it's an ominously upward trend. Interestingly enough, the Heritage Foundation also took a look at the first 26 months of Bush's presidency -- gas only rose 7 percent during that time frame.

Okay, that's true--technically speaking. But it's also horribly misleading. I certainly don't think that President Obama's energy policy is particularly sustainable or comprehensive, but to pillory him for rising gas prices without providing a lick of context is--you guessed it--bad science.

Setting aside the vague "Figures are adjusted for inflation" note that makes the chart difficult to adequately decipher, the movements of gas prices are, in and of themselves, not particularly useful information. The fact that gas prices rose "only 7 percent" during the first two years of the Bush presidency is reflective of the fact that he took over a booming economy, only to see it crater over the next two years in the wake of 9/11.

When the economy is in the doldrums, the gas price tends to be low...like it was in January of 2009, when Obama took office. Whether or not you believe in the sustainability of the economic recovery that has taken place over the last two years (oh yeah, Happy Anniversary, market bottom), the fact is that prices in nearly all markets have skyrocketed--in large part resulting from Fed policy, over which Obama has no direct control.

If you add another piece of information to this puzzle--namely, the price of the S&P 500 index over the same two time frames--a decidedly different picture emerges. To wit:

As you can see, Bush's 7% rise in gas prices was accompanied by a dramatic 37% drop in the stock market, whereas Obama's 67% rise in gas prices was matched by a 55% stock rally. Sure, gas prices were under two dollars a gallon in January 2009, but so was Ford's stock price ($1.80 then, over $14 now).

With that added piece of information, you could in fact even make the argument that Bush's rising gas price despite a falling market was reflective of WORSE energy policy than Obama's "rising prices everywhere" phenomenon--the relative outperformance of gas prices versus stock prices was much more dramatic under Bush. But by omitting this crucially important piece of information, Mr. Hemingway has made the same "mistake" that Paul Krugman made in his Texas-Wisconsin education comparison, thereby making any fair analysis impossible (unless you've got a fact-checker at the ready).

I often hear people parrot Mark Twain's old line that there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. I disagree. Statistics don't lie--only terribly biased journalists who improperly use them to prove a point do. Krugman and Hemingway, you're both damned liars, and you know it. Stop trying to mislead the public.

[Weekly Standard]
[Google Finance]