NY Times published discredited scholar John Lott
SUMMARY: The January 25 edition of The New York Times featured an op-ed by John R. Lott Jr., a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has a long record of dishonesty and misinformation in his scholarly works. The New York Times allowed Lott to trumpet his "new" study -- completed December 2004 -- and to allege "liberal bias" in the American Bar Association's ratings for federal district and circuit court nominees.
The January 25 edition of The New York Times featured an op-ed by John R. Lott Jr., a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in which Lott cited a "recently completed study" of the American Bar Association's (ABA) ratings for federal district and circuit court nominees to allege that the "association's liberal bias on its evaluations is there for all to see." In spite of Lott's long record of dishonesty and misinformation in his scholarly works, The New York Times allowed him to trumpet his "new" study -- completed December 2004 -- on its opinion page.
As Media Matters for America previously noted, Lott has been caught using fraudulent data, has been accused of lying about it to cover his tracks, and of using a fake Internet persona to hype his own falsified work. Lott claims to have conducted a 1997 survey on defensive gun usage, but evidence strongly suggests he never conducted it. A February 11, 2003, Washington Post article noted that Lott's "critics are asking: What national survey? Lott has been unable to produce the poll data, which he says were lost when his computer crashed." Lott also misrepresented the findings of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on voter disenfranchisement in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.
Additionally, Lott omitted from his New York Times op-ed a finding from his "recently completed" December 2004 study that seems to undercut his allegation of bias in ABA ratings. In the op-ed, Lott addressed the alleged disparity in ABA ratings between Republican and Democratic appellate court nominees from 1977 through 2004 but made no mention of the ratings for district court nominees. That may be because Lott's study found that the ABA ratings for Democratic district court nominees were lower than those for Republican nominees. According to Lott's study:
For District Judge nominees, it is difficult to see any consistent statistically significant pattern across the different Presidents. The one surprise in column 3 is that Carter and Clinton, the two Democratic Presidents, had nominees getting the lowest ABA scores. However, when other variables are accounted for Reagan is the lowest, but the next two lowest are again Carter and Clinton.
Lott offered a novel explanation for this "surprise":
Taken together these results are consistent with the relatively low ABA ratings for Democratic District Court nominees being used to hide the high ratings given to Democratic Circuit Court nominees.
Lott's byline has often appeared on the Los Angeles Times' opinion page, as well. In a June 28, 2005, Los Angeles Times op-ed, Lott used false statements and misleading comparisons to assert a supposed link between falling crime rates and the September 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban. As Media Matters noted, Lott committed a basic statistical fallacy by assuming that falling crime rates and the expiration of the weapons ban were somehow linked: correlation does not imply causation. Also, it was unclear how exactly Lott was able to assert the supposed link, as the state-specific FBI crime data he cited was -- at the time -- not scheduled to be publicly released for another four months.
Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum, author of the "Political Animal" weblog, issued a plea to The New York Times on January 25, asking its editorial page to "do your credibility a favor. Stop publishing this guy." Citing Lott's dubious scholarly record, Drum continued: "In a decent world, he would have been blackballed from polite editorial society long ago." Media Matters endorsed a similar November 2004 plea from Drum to Michael Kinsley, then-editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times, to stop publishing Lott's columns.
Whatever. * * * * *It seems that the right would try to find real truths and bring people to their party that way. But, given the rampant dishonesty throughout the Republican party, dishonesty must be easier, or work better. Right wing radio, TV, and guys such as this certainly lend credibility to the prejudices of the narrow minded. And now--There is a new study to back up these lies. The answer must be that there is no truth to the right wing rhetoric.
as soon as i saw the part about the "fake internet persona", i knew who this was. "mary rosh" was all over the internet praising john lott and his work. and a splendid job "she" did, because john lott was mary rosh. as far as i'm concerned, and the times should be as well, this automatically disqualifies a person to be in a leading newspaper, particularly the "paper of record". the fact that this fake, this fraud, this snakeoil salesman is allowed in the pages of the times speaks volumes. we just saw the whole business of their allowing judith miller to write her phony wmd stories with conman ahmad chalabi as her "anonymous source", and now this. hang your head in shame, new york times, and do not buy this newspaper.
sheesh.
Funny, how not one single cry of "liberal bias" ever turns out to be legit.
Below is a brief response to a set of charges made at Media Matters as well as Kevin Drum's website that they reference prominently.
[link to mediamatters.org] cites a website listing a serious of charges against me (see [link to www.washingtonmonthly.com]
The numbers notes below are the charges made by Kevin Drum ([link to www.washingtonmonthly.com] My responses immediately follow.
1) Lott and two coauthors produced a statistical model ("Model 1") that showed significant crime decreases when states passed concealed carry gun laws.
-- The paper that is being referred to here was published by Florenz Plassmann and John Whitley in the Stanford Law Review. I was not an author of the Stanford Law Review. I had helped with them for a while on this project, but dropped out before publication (see Plassmann's statement on the fact that "John Lott helped us out on" it [link to johnrlott.tripod.com] their paper also has a footnote making a similar statement).
2) Back in April, two critics discovered that there were errors in the data Lott used. When the correct data was plugged into Lott's model, his results went away.
-- Out of about 7.5 million data cells, the Plassmann and Whitley data set had accidentally left 180 cell blank. The results did not go away. Some results were weakened, but the central results that the Plassmann and Whitley article emphasized were not affected (for Plassmann's response see: [link to johnrlott.tripod.com] What these attacks fail to mention is that there are a large number of studies that have found similar reductions in crime after right-to-carry laws were adopted and that no refereed study has found evidence of a statistically significant increase in crime. For a list of papers published in refereed journals both before and after the paper by Plassmann and Whitley was published see In addition, the Stanford Law Review had to issue a very unusual "clarification" regarding charges that these two critics were making ([link to johnrlott.tripod.com] see also the statement by Plassmann and Whitley [link to johnrlott.tripod.com]
-- The data for Plassmann and Whitley's paper entitled "Confirming More Guns, Less Crime" is obtainable here: [link to www.johnlott.org] Just scroll down to the bottom of that web page. The statement discussing the data is located here: [link to www.johnlott.org] (though it has been updated over time).
3) After a long silence, Lott admitted the data errors and posted a table with new results. Oddly, though, his new results were similar to his old ones and continued to show significant drops in crime. So who's right, Lott or his critics?
-- As a favor to Plassmann and Whitley, I had put up their data set on a website that I have (www.johnlott.org). When the errors in the data set were discovered, I immediately put up a corrected version. There was a note next to the data set announcing the correction and that note was updated over time.
4) Answer: his critics. It turns out that since he really had no choice but to use the corrected data, and the corrected data erased his results, he decided to invent a different model ("Model 2") for use in this new table — but without disclosing the fact that he had switched to a new model specifically constructed to keep his results intact. Note: In less refined circles this would be called "lying."
-- The data set was corrected in April 2003 (See the statement by James Knowles who was my Research Assistant at that time [link to johnrlott.tripod.com] and that was months before these charges were made in September ([link to www.washingtonmonthly.com] While
5) When Tim discovered that Lott had surreptitiously changed his model, he emailed Lott. No response.
Because he has been so abusive, I programmed the filter on email program to filter out emails from Tim Lambert. For awhile my RAs and I did respond to his emails.
6) It turns out Lott was busy covering his tracks. How? By quietly removing the corrected table from his website and replacing it with a new corrected table. This one uses Model 2 but has the old, incorrect data.
Jeff Koch, my web master, accidentally cut the link to the correct file ([link to johnrlott.tripod.com] The error was there for less than a day.
7) Here's where you have to pay attention. Why would Lott do this?
Answer: this new table claims to be "corrected: April 18, 2003," and it turns out that Lott is trying to pretend that this was the original table he had posted all those months ago. That way, he could claim that he had never changed his model at all. Model 2 is the one he's been using all along!
-- The corrected file was indeed put up when the data set was released. Please see the statement by James Knowles ([link to johnrlott.tripod.com]
8) Unfortunately, when Lott changed the revision date on the document to make it look like it had been created on 4/18/03, he changed it to 1/18/04 instead. What's more, Lott apparently doesn't know that you can check the create date of PDF documents anyway, and this one was created on 9/2/03. That is, it was created in September, not April.
Please again see a statement from my webmaster Jeff Koch who handled this episode and James Knowles who put the original corrected files together for the website ([link to johnrlott.tripod.com] Because the names on the files were similar and in order to make sure that the wrong one wasn't posted, I provided Jeff with another copy of the file. The 1/18/04 date, which was well in the future at that time of these other events, was due to a faulty time date on the computer that being used.
Responses to other points in the Media Matters attack.
1) Statement regarding Civil Rights Commission.
-- This claim of error on my part comes from selectively looking at just part of the interview. The very next set of sentences from the interview made it completely clear what I was saying.
"I mean, you have the Commission on Civil Rights did an extensive set of hearings, they weren't able to identify even one person. ... No. . . . Even the Democrats on the Civil Rights Commission were not able to point to a single case of voter intimidation in Florida. They had possibilities that might have existed. But the only cases that people could even point to that were even remotely were similar would be like a police officer's car who was a mile from the polling place. Nothing that the police officer intimidated people or talked to people or threatened them and he was a mile from the polling place. And no evidence, not one case where they could point to somebody who, because of intimidation, didn't vote." What I was clearly referring to was voter disenfranchisement due to voter intimidation. I also believe that the claim regarding systematic bias against African-Americans due to voting machines is wrong, but that is a different point from what I was making, though it is what Media Matters is referring to. I was not arguing that the Democratic majority on Civil Rights Commission claimed that a systematic bias did not exist nor that they claimed that not a single voter had trouble voting because of voting machine error.
2) District, Circuit and Supreme Court results for the ABA.
-- There are not statistically significant differences for the District Courts. I have found statistically significant differences for circuit and Supreme court nominees and that is what the op-ed says. I think that this is best interpreted as a bias being reserved for those nominations that matter the most.
3) "Lott's byline has often appeared on the Los Angeles Times' opinion page, as well. In a June 28, 2005, Los Angeles Times op-ed, Lott used false statements and misleading comparisons to assert a supposed link between falling crime rates and the September 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban. As Media Matters noted, Lott committed a basic statistical fallacy by assuming that falling crime rates and the expiration of the weapons ban were somehow linked: correlation does not imply causation. Also, it was unclear how exactly Lott was able to assert the supposed link, as the state-specific FBI crime data he cited was -- at the time -- not scheduled to be publicly released for another four months."
-- This misstates what my piece said. The piece quotes proponents of the assault weapon ban saying that crime would soar after it was sunset. What I argued was that: "The fact that the end of the assault weapons ban didn't create a crime wave should not have surprised anyone. After all, there is not a single published academic study showing that these bans have reduced any type of violent crime." And the piece concludes that: "Gun controllers' fears that the end of the assault weapons ban would mean the sky would fall were simply not true."
--The op-ed length did not allow me to get into all the data issues. While monthly crime data had not yet been released, crime data had been released for the first six months of the year and for the entire year. It was easy to show that the crime rate had fallen for the last six months. The assault weapons ban had sunset for four of those six months. Later data have confirmed what I argued. Later in 2005 I wrote: "On Oct. 18, the FBI released the final data for 2004. It shows clearly that in the months after the law sunset, crime went down. During 2004 the murder rate nationwide fell by 3 percent, the first drop since 2000, with firearm deaths dropping by 4.4 percent. The new data show the monthly crime rate for the United States as a whole during 2004, and the monthly murder rate plummeted 14 percent from August through December. By contrast, during the same months in 2003 the murder rate fell only 1 percent."
4) The Media Matters attack notes that they have made these pleas to the LA Times to get them to stop running my pieces in November 2004.
Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum, author of the "Political Animal" weblog, issued a plea to The New York Times on January 25, asking its editorial page to "do your credibility a favor. Stop publishing this guy." Citing Lott's dubious scholarly record, Drum continued: "In a decent world, he would have been blackballed from polite editorial society long ago." Media Matters endorsed a similar November 2004 plea from Drum to Michael Kinsley, then-editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times, to stop publishing Lott's columns.
-- As the Media Matters piece mentions, the LA Times has published my pieces since then. Nick Goldberg asked James Q. Wilson for his opinion on these charges. Wilson told Goldberg that "The charge that he invented data or fabricated data is, in my view, false."
and Lott publishes anecdotes to respond to "inaccurate claims." Not one of MMFA's claims were shown to be "inaccurate" by Mr Lott's long-winded series of posts. Lott is using the "opinion as fact" fallacy to make his points. His points are not sharp enough to pierce MMFA's claims.
Perhaps he should have posted as "Mary Rosh."
"Because he has been so abusive, I programmed the filter on email program to filter out emails from Tim Lambert. For awhile my RAs and I did respond to his emails."
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Isn't that the same thing the Washington Post did recently when shown that their ombudsman was lying? They received so much criticism they suddenly declared that the posts were "hateful" and "abusive" and shut down comments on their blog. Lott just ignored someone who was pointing out his untruths, and decided that the truth was "abusive," and stopped listening.
Putting your fingers in your ears won't silence your critics. Publishing truthful articles and editorials will. But the right won't do this, because lying is so much easier, and the American public will fall for ir anyway, so why bother doing the work required to back up any claims? Just make the claims, quote the academic equivalent of the Paris Business Review to support those claims, and then whine and cry about "liberal bias" when you are found out.
"The charge that he invented data or fabricated data is, in my view, false."
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The actual charge, that he misrepresented data, is not addressed at all. How slippery of him.
If a willingness to look at the facts before letting ideology determine your answer is liberal bias, then hooray for liberal bias!
See my response here.
Are you kidding me? You spammed with all the posts above rather than just linking to this is in the first place? Learn some Netiquette.
Pretty well everything in Lott's response is untrue. I got through it point by point here.