The NYT misleads readers about Tea Party unemployment

In an article last week, the NYT tries to give the impression that a disproportional fraction of Tea Partiers are unemployed and living off the government (obviously in order to de-legitimize the movement and make them appear hypocritical). The article is called "With No Jobs, Plenty of Time for Tea Party".

What is noteworthy is that the article is entirely anecdotal. It starts with some guy who lost his job and contacted the government for help.

"When Tom Grimes lost his job as a financial consultant 15 months ago, he called his congressman, a Democrat, for help getting government health care."

Second, some scholar is cited to support the NYT story, although if you read it carefully he doesn't really give any new facts about the current Tea Party either.

"The Great Depression, too, mobilized many middle-class people who had fallen on hard times. Though, as Michael Kazin, the author of “The Populist Persuasion,” notes, they tended to push for more government involvement. The Tea Party vehemently wants less — though a number of its members acknowledge that they are relying on government programs for help"

There are no statistics cited by the NYT to support their claim that Tea Partiers disproportionately live of the government. This is the problem with articles that do not use statistics, anecdotes can be used to "prove" anything.

Today, Gallup released a poll about the demographics of Tea Party supporters.

It turns out the NYT is dead wrong. Tea Party supporters are substantially less likely to be unemployed than U.S adults in general. Only 6% of Tea Partiers are unemployed.

Now, this poll is about supporters, while the NYT claim was about activists. However this CNN poll indicates that Tea Party activists (7% of the population) are much better off financially than the population at large and better off than the total population of Tea Party supporters (28% of the population). 66% of Tea Party activist make more than 50 k, compared to 42% in the total sample of the adult population in the CNN poll.

From an scientific point of view the NYT article is nonsense, using anecdotes to give their readers the opposite impression of what statistics tell us. This is what the NYT specializes in: well written articles with an intellectual tone that are generally wrong in substance. The NYT is high quality junk.

Interestingly David Frum's homepage cited this NYT article, even though they must have known it contained no evidence of their smear of Tea Partiers. That tells us something about David Frum.