Columbia Journalism Review reports that 18 months ago, George Mason University economics professor Daniel B. Klein wrote a column about his finding that liberals scored much worse on a test about basic economics than libertarians and conservatives. The Wall Street Journal published the column under the headline: “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”
Klein revisited his earlier findings, going back to confirm them only to find out that what he’d been confirming was confirmation bias:
But one year later, in May 2011, Buturovic and I published a new scholarly article reporting on a new survey. It turned out that I needed to retract the conclusions I’d trumpeted in The Wall Street Journal. The new results invalidated our original result: under the right circumstances, conservatives and libertarians were as likely as anyone on the left to give wrong answers to economic questions. The proper inference from our work is not that one group is more enlightened, or less. It’s that “myside biasâ€â€”the tendency to judge a statement according to how conveniently it fits with one’s settled position—is pervasive among all of America’s political groups. The bias is seen in the data, and in my actions.
WSJ refused to print his retraction. Instead The Atlantic has published it.
It appears WSJ has adopted the same attitude towards truth as its sister “news” network – Fox News.
