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Gell mann effect11/29/2023 ![]() He then wrote about it publicly and one of their most vociferous anti-choice advocates, Craig Harris, personally attacked him rather than engage in any substantive defense of their advocacy piece “reporting”:Īs I noted to Harris, if you add two green apples plus two red apples plus two oranges and get six apples, the math is right but the answer is wrong. When the Goldwater Institute’s Matt Beienburg detected some serious flaws in the Republic’s award-winning “reporting” on charter schools, he brought it to their attention but they ignored him. Sadly, this is a part of a longstanding pattern. They repeatedly used inferences to determine their “real” motives instead of just, well, asking. Indeed, their “Gaggle” podcast did not interview anyone from the pro-school choice side. Had they any real interest in ascertaining the truth, there are any number of individuals and organizations in Arizona that could have provided them with accurate information had they asked. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about the Republic’s “reporting” is that it wasn’t really reporting. The Republic hid the fact that only 1% of the bills they analyzed were based on model legislation.The Republic portrayed the use of model legislation as a particularly right-wing plot but excluded all the model legislation from the older and larger left-of-center National Conference of State Legislatures. ![]() The Republic portrayed the use of model legislation as unusual and nefarious when actually it’s commonplace and banal, a tool used across the political spectrum since the late 1800s.Indeed, as Ladner details, the Republic’s “reporting” on “copycat legislation” suffered from several other flaws, including but not limited to the following: In fact, as Ladner points out, the reverse is true: ALEC’s model legislation was based on Arizona’s law. The Republic had its own “wet streets cause rain” moment recently when it claimed that Arizona copied its education savings account (ESA) legislation from model legislation at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). You turn the page, and forget what you know. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. The Republic’s crack team of reporters have determined that the above streets caused a major rainstorm.īrother Matt’s takedown of the Arizona Republic’s absurdly erroneous and biased reporting reminds me of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, a concept identified by author Michael Crichton:īriefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows.
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