I was going to write a piece on Bill Dedman’s “investigation” for MSNBC of donations to politicians or political organizations, but journalism professor Chris Day did it for me. Thanks, Chris.

The MSNBC article failed on so many journalistic grounds. It rested heavily on the notion that there was an overweighting of donations by liberal or progressive reporters as compared to conservatives. But Chris puts the matter into perspective:

• Dedman’s report violates one of the first rules about working with numbers in journalism: PROVIDE CONTEXT […] Dedman notes that there are approximately 100,000 newsroom employees nationwide. By my calculations, then, the number of donors comes to 0.1% In other words, the headline could have been: 99.9% of U.S. journalists do not donate to politicians.
• A lot of the people he “exposes” in this piece are ridiculously peripheral to the coverage of partisan politics – gardening editors, rock critics and the like.
• Dedman decided to exclude “executives” from his investigation, without offering a convincing rationale. Where are Roger Ailes? Rupert Murdoch?
• Dedman reports that of the 144 donors, 125 gave to Democrats, while “only” 17 gave to Republicans. (Two, like Exxon, gave to both parties.) But, I notice that most of the donations to Democrats are in chicken-shit amounts like $200 or $250, while one of the Republican donors gave $90,000. I suspect that the totals given to the two parties are not that far off.

This is the kind of in-depth analysis that Dedman should have employed. Unfortunately, his version was released into the media wild and has been picked up by many other news organizations and even pretenders like Bill O’Reilly who led with the inflammatory and false conclusion that liberals outnumber conservatives in the press by 9 to 1. It really doesn’t help to supply liars like O’Reilly with pseudo-news items like this.