Yes, but not for long. Mark Thoma shoots down the conservative think tank site that caught the Wall Street Journal, a paper I no longer subscribe to, in a lie and immediately reversed itself for “editorial reasons.” There is no truth in conservative ideology when intellectual dishonesty of this sort is the rule.
“The Disappearing Tax Foundation Blog Post”:
I recently noted a post from The Tax Foundation accusing the Wall Street Journal editorial page of of ‘a textbook example of how to lie with statistics.’
Bruce Bartlett points to a Tax Foundation article that accuses the WSJs editorial page of ‘a textbook example of how to lie with statistics.’: The Wall Street Journals Misleading Income Chart. When the Tax Foundation questions someones reliability, you know a line has been crossed.
Brendan Nyhan notes today that the Tax Foundation post has been taken down [cached copy]:
… At this point, youre probably wondering why this post doesnt contain any links to the Tax Foundation website. The reason is that this sort of intra-movement criticism has a short shelf life — so short that the post had already vanished by this morning. Scott Hodge, the president of the Tax Foundation, confirmed that the post had been removed: ‘we withdrew the post for editorial and content reasons.’ He did not elaborate further.
Then, later, he does elaborate further — that is, if we never got around to it qualifies as elaboration:
Update 5/16 4:51 PM [EST]: More from Hodge via email:
Like all organizations we have an editorial process. The piece was posted before I could edit it. I thought it needed revision and editing. We never got around to posting a satisfactory version. Its a moot point now.
Leaving the original post up, and then doing a follow-up post explaining the problem with the first post (which has not yet been explained other than someone thought ‘it needed revision and editing’) would have been a more honest approach.
Either the editorial process is so bad that false claims appear on the site that are later removed without explanation — not a very encouraging sign for the site — or the post was removed because it told the truth. In any case, my statement that the Tax Foundations reliability is questionable is certainly validated by this episode.