Revisiting Bush's abortion increase myth

Michelle Malkin has received a response from Nicolas Kristof of the NY Times regarding his column that falsely asserted (without a source) that abortions have increased significantly under George W. Bush.

His response:

michelle,

thanks belatedly for your note about hillary and abortions. i was in zimbabwe, skulking around and pretending to be a tourist, and didn't have web access. but now i did have a chance to look at your web link, and i'm afraid i disagree.

you're right that it was stassen's work that originally pointed me to this issue and that the data cover only 16 states. but stassen has considerable credibility, since he is himself pro-life and trained in statistics, and others in the repro health field have found his work sensible. moreover, while the data are incomplete, the states represented include a range of different geographic areas and seem representative. and among those 16 states, the trend was very clear. Stassen calculates that there are 50,000 more abortions a year than if the previous trend had continued.

sorry for the delay....

allbest, nick kristof

This is atrocious. "I'll take the word of a guy who says he's prolife (even though it is doubtful that Kristof would trust people who work for prolife organizations and are actually trained in statistics) without actually looking to see if his statistics are accurate (even though typing "stassen" and "abortion" into any search engine will get you a bunch of blogs and organizations that disprove Stassen's faulty use of faulty statistics) and then I'll pass that work on as fact in my column without providing a source."

Bravo!! What journalistic integrity!

The standards Kristoff uses for purporting something as fact are lower than most of blogs I've ever read. Most blogs at least usually try to provide some source/link or reasoning and check to see if that source is credible. Kristoff just takes one guy's faulty research and displays it as fact without even mentioning Stassen's name or how he came up with these statistics.

This complete lack of analysis and sourcing doesn't belong in a middle school term paper much less the "paper of record."