Did the Wall Street Journal Fire their Fact-Checkers? (FiveThirtyEight)

[struggle4progress]

Monday, January 5, 2009

The Wall Street Journal is bar none one of the best newspapers in the country -- except when its Editorial Board is having a bad day. And today the Board is having a very bad day, having published an editorial that declares Al Franken's provisional win in Minnesota, which the state just certified moments ago, to be illegitimate, while accusing Minnesota's Canvassing Board of being inconsistent and biased in favor of Franken ...

... Ritchie may be a Democrat, but he was also .. elected .. by the people of Minnesota. And .. the Canvassing Board .. arguably leans to the right, consisting of two members appointed by Tim Pawlenty, one appointed by Jesse Ventura, one elected member, and Ritchie.

... Coleman is having far more trouble with the Minnesota Supreme Court, which generally has a conservative reputation, than he is with the Canvassing Board. They're the ones who rejected his petition on duplicate ballots, and they're the ones who rejected his notion of wanting to tack on additional ballots to the absentee ballot counting.

There are 25 precincts with more ballots than voters? I'm not sure this is .. true. There were .. precincts with more votes counted during the recount than there were on Election Night -- which is not surprising, considering that the .. purpose of a .. recount is to find votes .. missed the first time around. I have not seen any evidence .. that there are precincts with more votes than voters as recorded on sign-in sheets. And the Coleman campaign evidently hasn't either, or it presumably would have presented it to the Court, which rejected its petition for lack of evidence ...

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/01/did-wall-street-jorunal-fire-their-fact.html

[baldguy]

1. Fire them? They gave them promotions.

[meegbear]

2. The Wall Street Journal's editorial was always like that ...

even BEFORE Murdoch bought it.

[Jackpine Radical]

3. Tht's what I was gonna say.

The straight news stuff is as good as it gets in American print media, but the editorial writers either don't read or don't comprehend the news content of their own paper.

[no limit]

4. Anyone starting to notice how election inconsistencies that favor democrats

get blown out of proportion (even when no such inconsistencies exist) but when those same inconsistencies favor republicans we don't hear a fucking word about it?