Recently in the sister blog:
Niall Ferguson is a hack.
Niall Ferguson is not always a hack, sometimes he just makes silly mistakes.
Paul Krugman is not a hack, but he sometimes he goes over the top.
P.S. Yes, technically I’m misusing the expression, it should really be something like, “Watching the sharks get jumped.” But I liked the image of the jumping shark.
Although except Krugman most likely didn’t on that occassion:
“A study conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 76 percent of stories about Gore in early 2000 focused on either the theme of his alleged lying or that he was marred by scandal, while the most common theme about Bush was that he was “a different kind of Republican.””
So, the conclusion ought to be that AG is not a hack, but sometimes goes over the top.
If Krugman isn’t a hack, when was the last time a column of his mentioned the Republican Party without an eye to advantaging the Democrats’ electoral fortunes?
When was the last time the republican party was acting in the best interests of the United States of America???
See mitch mcconnel et al…
Krugman argues points with data and simple graphs, like this one about the ‘growth’ (according to Rand Paul) of the size of government: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/exploding-government/
The responses I see are never supported by evidence, just shrill complaints.
Hello Chris – where are you????
I wonder if the term “hack” isn’t one of those vague terms where everyone has a slightly different definition (and we’ll all have biases that make us see a “lie” in favor of our prejudices as likely to be borderline rather than outright false).
That being said, the idea that 65 year olds are in their prime (as referenced in one of the links) does seem to be an odd one. Capable of doing meaningful and useful work is often true (but the rising tide of disability and dementia need to be considered) but this still requires a workplace that is able to adapt to issues for older adults and a compensation curve that handles the productivity changes. But people who do their best work at 65 are notable as exceptions and not the rule for most workers. I was skeptical about members of the house but the top 5 ranking members do seem to make the 65 year old theory work:
John Boehner 62
Eric Cantor 49
Nancy Pelosi 72
Kevin McCarthy 47
Steny Hoyer 73
So I will grant congressman as an exception, but there does seem to be a lot of variablity (even here).
Anonymous: I’m not a hack because I actually believe what I write.
Chris: Same with Krugman.
K Street is full of hirelings that sincerely believe the position of the interest groups they work for. That doesn’t stop them being hacks who only cite facts that serve one side of the story.
Krugman was once a two-handed economist who acknowledged that his profession was fundamentally about acknowledging trade-offs. Now he’s a guy who does nothing but recite partisan talking points to whip his readers into a zealous frenzy.
I guess Krugman was wrong to claim that the media bias was “very obviously true to anyone who lived through it,” since we can assume Andrew has a good memory for those events, and he doesn’t remember it that way. But I had the same impression Krugman had (and I don’t watch TV either). One of the things that bothered me most was the way the media seemed to accept and amplify the Bush campaign’s baseless charge that Gore claimed to have invented the internet, instead of giving Gore some credit for promoting funding to develop the internet in its early days, before the WWW was invented.
Gore and Internet: I can’t locate my original copy of the email I got, but Vint Cerf and Bob Hahn (TCP/IP, i.e., not the Internet,but an important part) wrote this in 2000. Key comment:
‘No one person or even small group of persons exclusively “invented” the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore’s contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.’
Why not define hack or provide examples of ideal types at either end of political spectrum; train a machine; and derive a latent hack index using text analysis of academic commentator comments.
Maybe register your protocol beforehand, just in case the latent index has you up in the hack measure… :-)