Monday, March 19, 2012

A Diamond in the Rough



     Ah, journalism. It’s like mining for diamonds, really. More often than not, you spend inordinate amounts of time seeking gemstones and find nothing of value. Occasionally, you uncover little gems like this one.

     This “little” gem goes against everything the Liberal model of journalism stands for, and somehow embodies its spirit perfectly. It shows no party parallelism, and no obvious bias. It is direct, informative, and conversational—despite its extreme relative length, even the dense statistics do not seem daunting.

     The jist of the story is this: with statistical evidence “going back 36 years into newspaper clippings and gallup polling archives,” we have no substantial evidence to say that Romney does or doesn’t have a shot at the presidency. To say his task of securing a lead over Obama following any securing of the Republican nomination will be easy would be absurd. Possible? Perhaps. Likely? Not by the numbers. And there are plenty of numbers.

     While most American journalism is events-based, this is not the case for this article. Andrew Romano, the author of this fine piece of journalism, no doubt spent long hours researching the past 36 years of statistics. As such, it is comments-based, and focuses as political scientists like to focus—on trends and hard evidence.

So while most journalism is a “5 year olds’ soccer game,” there seems to be a braniac on the bench working strategy.

Andrew Romano as American Journalism's Aladdin: a true "Diamond in the Rough."

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