The Wardman Wire

Checking the Facts

I posted a short piece about the Guardian Media Top 100 yesterday mentioning Guido, and the obligatory link back to the “Newsnight experience”. During the skewering of Guido, Jeremy Paxman said:

Facts are treated very loosely in the blogosphere, aren’t they?

This cuts both ways, especially when numbers are involved - we all need to get the facts straight.

So let’s have the final visit to the Sunday Independent’s article a couple of weeks ago about web statistics to see an example of “facts treated very loosely in the media”.

Yesterday I looked at statements in Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s Independent column where I think she stepped over the line into simple racism against the “indigenous British” (as she calls them). This is a line-by-line examination of Ms Alibhai-Brown’s illogical leaps and bounds, with some statistics and citations.