Reporting That Makes You Stupid
Todays Financial Times bears a banner headline on p.1: US election hangs on a knife edge. Aside from everything else, surely this gets the cliche wrong: you rest on a knife edge, dont you? If you try to hang on one, I think you just cut off your fingers.
More important, though, this headline deeply misleads readers about the state of the race and in so doing, it echoes a lot of political reporting right now. Quite simply, many of the analysis articles being published in these final days leave readers worse informed than they were before reading.
As Nate Silver (who has lately attracted a remarkable amount of hate welcome to my world, Nate!) clearly explains, state polling currently points overwhelmingly to an Obama victory. Its possible that the polls are systematically biased and this bias has to encompass almost all the polls, since even Rasmussen is now showing Ohio tied. So Romney might yet win. But a knife-edge this really isnt, and any reporting suggesting that it is makes you stupider.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/reporting-that-makes-you-stupid/