Well-Read Deadline Story on Biden Commits Key Error

Uncorrected story about POTUS inaccessibility concludes that 118 is less than 71

Journalists make mistakes. Even careful journalists understand that the speed and complexity of breaking news makes it almost impossible to get it right the first time every time.

However, when it comes to math and data, in my experience, journalists not only get it wrong more than they should, but they’re too willing to write things that obviously make no sense, turning simple transposition errors into nonsensical expressions of fact.

And then it takes too long for them to correct.

In a well-read article that appeared last night on the Hollywood news site Deadline, the usually excellent reporters Dominic Patten and Ted Johnson wrote about skepticism that has overcome entertainment industry backers of Joe Biden following his catastrophic debate performance last Thursday night. The authors discussed how one anonymous donor complained about Biden’s failure to appear on 60 Minutes or the Sunday morning shows to stop the bleeding and address concerns about his fitness to serve.

Here’s a screenshot of the Deadline article:

You can see that they assert that “compared to his predecessors, Biden has done relatively few” with “sit-down interview(s).”

The authors go on to cite Biden’s 118 interviews as being relatively few compared to Trump doing 97 and Obama doing 71. It should have been obvious to the authors that 118 is not “relatively few” compared to 97 or 71. So it’s not just a matter of writing the number down wrong; it’s that the numbers don’t make sense.

What happened here is illustrative of how mistakes get made by journalists moving too quickly.

For the source material, the authors cited the Washington Post, which had written about the data. Data that came from Martha Joynt Kumar, a former professor of political science at Towson University and director of the White House Transition Project.

But the journalists conflated two different statistics. The 97 for Trump and 71 for Obama refers not to the number of interviews given by each; that’s the number of press conferences each had given through April of the last year of his first term. Compared to those, Biden gave a very meager 34 press conferences through the end of April in the last year of his first term.

The 118 number did indeed characterize one-on-one interviews for Biden. According to Joynt Kumar, Biden did indeed give 118 one-on-one interviews through April of the last year of his first term. But according to the same source, Trump gave 327, and Obama gave a whopping 479.

In other words, the point the reporters were trying to make – Biden is far less accessible to the press and to the public than his recent predecessors – is correct. But their numbers were completely wrong.

This was not some obscure story that no one read. The authors included powerful and persuasive inside-the-room anecdotes from an anonymous source who was allegedly an attendee at the Michele and Rob Reiner fundraiser for Biden on Saturday night with special guest Kamala Harris, just two days after the calamitous debate appearance last Thursday.

But when you’re going to quote anonymous sources, especially those expressing criticism, the bar for printing reliable information should be that much higher.

And this story was presumably much better read than the insider Hollywood stuff normally featured in Deadline because it earned a link on the Drudge Report, which usually sends a firehose of those who care about politics in the direction of any story it recommends.

The story went up yesterday at 6:43 PM and yet today at 4:20 PM EST, it remained, nonsensical framing and all.

In an age of deep fakes and fake news and deep fake news, it’s more important than ever to slow down a minute and ask, “Does this make sense? Do the numbers I’m citing even support the conclusion I’m drawing?” Here’s hoping the hard-working, well-meaning journalists covering this November’s elections treat themselves — and their readers — to those few extra moments that separate fact from fiction.