What follows goes a long way towards explaining how demagogues have managed to do so well in elections across the world.
I just checked out the class requirements for the Columbia School of Journalism, the nation's most prestigious journalism school. As far as I could tell, journalism students are not required to take any statistics classes. No wonder they get taken in by simple statistical frauds! They don't understand basic statistical analysis at all.
This seems tragic to me as most reporting consists of little more than giving some statistic or other and then infering causation from an individual human interest story used as an example of the statistic. If you want to know why the news media is as terrible as it is, look no further than the Columbia School of Journalism. In fact, I've got a new slogan for them.
Columbia J-School: The nation's leader in preparing reporters to be victimized by the simplest of ruses.
Going a bit further, there is no indication that J-school graduates know much of anything outside of writing. The outstanding blog, Carpe Diem, goes even farther in explaining what's going on when it shows relative salaries for J-school graduates vs. other disciplines. No one is getting into journalism for the money and I would further argue that no one gets into journalism because engineering and physics were too easy.
Without backgrounds in other disciplines and without any analytical tools, the newsmedia is ripe for exploitation by demagogues and charlatans. After seeing this, I'm not surprised that politicans can get elected by saying demonstrably stupid things.
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