Byron Calame savages the New York Times again, this time for including data about unmarried mothers that can’t be married.

I kid you not. The whole article is a worthy read and you really need to check it out. This was my particular favorite part:

When I began to look into reader concerns about the article shortly after it appeared, it became clear that there was confusion over the issue of 15-year-olds. Mr. Roberts initially told me, and wrote in an e-mail, that 15-year-olds had been excluded from the “raw numbers” cited in the article, mainly because he had discovered some states’ restrictions on marriage at that age. So the statements in the article and graphic that 15-year-olds were not counted seemed at first to be consistent with what Mr. Roberts had told me and the office of the standards editor last month.

My subsequent questions, however, led to Mr. Roberts’s eventual acknowledgment that 15-year-olds had been fully included in all the data. Seeking to explain that shift, he wrote in a Jan. 30 e-mail to me: “When I realized that nothing would change by eliminating 15-year-olds, I left the numbers as is, again for consistency.”

Actually, leaving out 15-year-olds would have cast statistical doubt on the new majority. A calculation done for me by Times consultants at the Queens College department of sociology in New York shows that the number of females 16 years old and older not living with a spouse in 2005 exceeded the total living with one, but by a small number that was well within the margin of error.

Mr. Roberts is now defending the inclusion of 15-year-olds on the basis of historical comparability and consistency. He points out that the Census Bureau has collected and reported marital data on them for decades — going back to a time when marriage at that age was more common than today. (Even the Census Bureau can recognize that times do change, however: it once included 14-year-olds in its marital status data, but no longer does so.)

So Sam Roberts first said the data wasn’t included at all.

Then he said they were, but they didn’t statistically change the tenor of the article.

Then he said they had to be included because inclusion was necessary to make data across multiple years consistent.

In other words, he got caught lying.

Badly.

No wonder Calame won’t be around in a few weeks.

NY Times via Hot Air

Technorati Tags: calame, ny times, woops

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