Tell all the truth, but tell it slant

by Doctor Science

Well, tell *some* of the truth. But the slant part they can do.

I walked to the convenience store to get milk. I saw the sign for the "Naanwich" of the day -- tandoori chicken and pepper strips with chutney, wrapped in a naan. The convenience store in this teeny semi-rural NJ town is now run by Gujaritis, and the results are *delicious*.

While I was waiting for my naanwich, I read the headlines in the stacks of newspapers. The NY Times was there, next to the Wall Street Journal. The lead story in the Times: Top Corporations Aid U.S. Chamber of Commerce Campaign. The lead story in the WSJ: Campaign's Big Spender: Public-Employees Union Now Leads All Groups in Independent Election Outlays.

The two stories were bolstered by these charts:
NY Times:

Wall Street Journal:

For ease of comparison, I broke out the overlapping data (numbers are $millions spent in this two-year election cycle):

	WSJ	NYTimes
Chamber of Commerce	75.0	21.1
American Crossroads+Crossroads GOP	65.0	19.7
American Action Network		15.3
SEIU	44.0	10.6
American Future Fund		8.7
Americans for Job Security		8.0
AFSCME	87.5	7.9
NEA	40.0	6.8
total spending by listed pro-Rs	140.0	72.8
total spending by listed pro-Ds	171.5	25.3

As you can see, we have multiple levels of WTF here:

• The same organizations are assigned radically different numbers by the two papers, though they claim to be considering the same time frames


• It's not just the numbers, the relative rankings of the organizations differ, too


• The NY Times' list is longer, so I included all the orgs on their chart down to the point where the last one on the WSJ chart occurs. All the orgs included on the Times list but not on the WSJ list are Republican supporters.


• WSJ shows more spending by pro-D orgs; NYTimes shows more by pro-Rs. What an amazing coincidence!

Questions, I got 'em:

1. How, journalistically and statistically speaking, does this happen?


2. Are both papers slanted but in opposite directions, so we can split the difference and call it "reality"? Or is one more slanted than the other, and if so, how do you prove it?


3. How are WSJ readers and NYTimes readers supposed to communicate with each other, when the information they're getting seems to come from different realities?

Comments

[Emile]

Thanks for the cogent "hey, that thing you said does not make sense" overview.

But now we are the proverbial person with two watches who doesn't know what time it is.

So, what time IS it?

[nous]

NYT says that it is looking at Federal races. I'm betting the unions spend most at state or local levels.

Might get us part way there.

[Jay S]

I read an analysis this morning (that I can't find now but here's a http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/1010/The_spending_we_dont_know_about.html>Ben Smith version,) that indicated part of the difference was that the NYT figures were using money already disclosed while the WSJ added in the numbers that the organization promised to spend.

[Morat20]

Did either note that unions are required, by a seperate law, to disclose where they've donated money?

It's rather hard to compare, say, SEIU expenditures with Chamber of Congress ones because the SEIU is effectively operating under a union-only DISCLOSE act, and the Chamber...isn't.

[Gary Farber]

Ben Smith's Politico piece that Jay S links to above does seem to answer the questions reasonably clearly.

As well as Morat20's point, which is discussed in Smith's piece, there's this:

[...] The Indy is right that the basic difference is that the Times is looking at disclosed spending, while the Journal is comparing promised spending.

But there's another difference as well: The independent expenditures disclosed daily to the FEC are limited to communications. Groups that disclose all their activities, like the party committees, will ultimately disclose their spending on other costs — field operatives, polling — but haven't yet. Unions like AFSCME will disclose those costs — along with unregulated "member-to-member" communications within their own ranks — in their annual report with the Department of Labor, well after the election. Crossroads GPS on the right and the liberal 501(c)(4) groups around America Votes on the left will never disclose their spending on field.

We're left, then, either relying for now on groups' claims or on partial tallies.

[air yeezy]

No matter how gluttonous devouring all the time, we need to breathe at this time, and strive to win our reputation, the sickle of time can not hurt us. - William Shakespeare