Why Reading the Front Page of the Newspaper Makes You Stupider

By James Kwak

At least when it comes to statistical issues:

(Courtesy of Nate Silver.) Gallup is the huge outlier among the tracking polls, which shows Romney leading by 6–7 points. (On average, the national polls show an exactly tied race.)

This news is a few days old, but the general principle it illustrates is timeless. Reporting tends toward the dramatic and the surprising. In some cases, that’s probably fine—like if you read the paper for entertainment. When it comes to statistics that suffer from measurement error, it’s journalistic malpractice.