Fisking Mitch Coleman

February 11, 2004

Here's a lovely bit from Shot In The Dark, in which Mitch Berg delivers a healthy fisking to the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Nick Coleman, whose column today pleads "Friends of Public Education Must Fight Back Now." Mr. Berg writes:

Nick Coleman knows what we need to do for public education; keep all existing, failing schools open, no matter what!

I'm going to start with a bit at the end of today's column: "Many thousands of children -- including three of mine -- have been served well by the Minneapolis public schools."

Mr. Berg ignores the really obvious question (Is it legal for Coleman to have fathered three thousand children?) and strikes the Achilles' heel of his argument:

Every morning in the Southwest, shamans of the Zuni tribe rise before the sun, and begin to pray. The Zuni believe that if they don't pray for the sun to rise in the morning, it won't. Since the sun rises in the morning, the prayers obviously work.

Correlation isn't necessarily causation.

We discovered this piece via the SCSU Scholars, who note, "If journalists would take even one statistics course and pass it, the quality of reporting and opining would go up greatly."