October 08, 2003
John Lott: Rush Was Right
John Lott, the author of Bias Against Guns, has taken a hard look at Rush Limbaugh's claim that the media is biased in favor of African-American quarterbacks at National Review:
The evidence suggests that Rush is right, though the simplest measures indicate that the difference is not huge. Looking at just the averages, without trying to account for anything else, reveals a ten-percent difference in coverage (with 67 percent of stories on blacks being positive, 61 percent for whites).
We also collected data by week for each of the first four weeks of the season on a host of other factors that help explain the rate at which a player is praised: the quarterback's rating for each game; whether his team won; the points scored for and against the team; ESPN's weekly rank for the quarterback's team and the opponent; and whether it was a Monday night game. In addition, I accounted for average differences in media coverage both in the quarterback's city and the opponent's city as well as differences across weeks of the season.
Accounting for these other factors shows a much stronger pattern. Black quarterbacks' news coverage is 27 percentage points more positive than whites. And that difference was quite statistically significant — the chance of this result simply being random is the same odds as flipping a coin five times and getting heads each time.
Lott wrote that the data from this study is available at his Web site, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Perhaps it hasn't been posted as of yet.
UPDATE: Lott has posted the data. For those interested, the raw data is here, and the regression output is here. I don't have any sort of expertise in this area, but if anyone else does, and wades through the data, let me know.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Plenty of folk have written in to pass along comments about what they see as Lott's issue with credibility. This being a sports blog, I won't dive into them in detail, but I do want to say that some of the things I've read gave me pause. For those of you with more interest in the subject, I'd suggest checking out the Instapundit archive. Just plug his name into the search engine and you'll find all you need.
As for the article itself, I posted the link in the interest of sparking debate. On the Limbaugh issue, as well as a number of others, I haven't been shy about posting a variety of viewpoints on the issue, pro and con. And that's something I'll continue to do.
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» Rush Redux, II from shonk::selling waves
A quick update to my previous post. Courtesy of Off Wing Opinion, I learned that John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns actually did some research to determine whether Limbaugh's comments had merit. From... [Read More]
Tracked on October 8, 2003 11:45 AM
» Rush Redux, II from shonk::selling waves
A quick update to my previous post. Courtesy of Off Wing Opinion, I learned that John Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime and The Bias Against Guns actually did some research to determine whether Limbaugh's comments had merit. From... [Read More]
Tracked on December 11, 2003 02:03 AM
Posted by:
at October 8, 2003 11:54 AM
You probably can't find the data from this "study" because Lott made it all up, as he has with his previous work.
dave
Posted by:
at October 8, 2003 01:00 PM
I don't follow the gun debate because i find it tedious, but it is hard to surf blogs without stumbling over it. From what I have seen, however, Mr. Lott has some extraordinarily serious creditability issues.
Posted by:
at October 8, 2003 01:11 PM
Posted by:
at October 8, 2003 06:46 PM
As I recall from the gun debate the primary complaints against Lott were #1, the data did not show what he claimed it did, and #2 that the data was just plain made up. From there, it got uglier.
Please, treat Mr. Lott's work with caution.
Posted by:
at October 8, 2003 07:42 PM
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