Fire the Headline Writers
The New York Times doesn’t like to publish our querulous letters, so we just publish them here. Since newspaper circulations keep shrinking while the audience for this web site has increased by over a billion percent since last year (when it didn’t exist) we may soon be able to cut them out of the loop entirely. Here are two of the latest.
To the Editor:
Get some new headline writers.
The ones you have are trying to destroy the paper and the country. Two sneak attacks this week alone.
1. For a story on Bush administration lies about CIA tapes, a subhead so bad that even Liar in Chief George Bush and Apologist-in Chief Dana Perino are able to demand and get a withdrawal and correction. That’s setting the bar so low even the centipedes can clear it.
2. On Friday’s front page, a headline that will enable right-wing religious fanatics to convince their zombie armies that stem cell research causes cancer. It says, “Scientists weigh stem cells’ role as cancer cause.”
Twenty-six paragraphs later, on page A-26, it’s mentioned that cancerous stem cells are not the same as embryonic stem cells. Who reads 26 paragraphs of anything?
So now the forces of darkness — enemies of science in the Bush administration, the honey-dippers of talk radio, and religious posturers of the far right — have all been handed an invitation to tell the world that the New York Times says stem cells are not only immoral but also carcinogenic.
You’re giving aid and comfort to Rupert Murdoch’s sinister subversion, and he didn’t even have to buy your newspaper to get it.
AND FIRE THE PROFESSORS
To the Editor
In “More Juice, Less Punch” in your Saturday (Dec 22) Op-Ed, authors Jonathan Cole and Stephen Stigler are statisticians who are violating the most fundamental rules of a statistical study.
They purport to show through statistics that pitchers and batters named by the Mitchell Commission actually fared no better after taking drugs than before taking them. They admit that the advancing age of these players might otherwise have worsened their averages but then brush off this factor as unaddressable by their data,
Worse, they ignore the need for a control group. Had they compared their statistics for drug-taking players with a group of pitchers and batters of comparable ages not known to have taken drugs, they might have a conclusion worth considering. How did the “clean” players fare as they aged, pitching and batting against players who were juicing?
The professors should take some research-enhancing drugs.
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