Posts Tagged ‘Derek Thompson’

Refuting Derek Thompson (or, Newsweek’s Self-Inflicted Wounds)

Friday, October 19th, 2012

Over at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson has a piece up laying the blame for Newsweek’s on the economy. “This is an economic story, plain and simple. The print news business is grim and hardly needs a lengthy explication.” Well, I’m sure the economy didn’t help. But the story of Newsweek‘s demise is not that plain, nor that simple.

I was going to laboriously track down magazine circulation data, enter it into Excel, and create a chart. Then I found that State of the Media had done it for me:

Notice how Time, Newsweek‘s chief competitor, starts sucking wind before the recession hits full force, then stabilizes, while Newsweek goes into freefall, then continues? In fact, Newsweek‘s nosedive gets steeper in 2009, right about the time the recession was bottoming out around the New Obama Normal. What could have happened then?

While conservatives had long complained of Newsweek‘s liberal bias, it was 2009 when Newsweek finally gave up their pretense of being neutral and all but announced they were in the tank for Obama.

They practically came out and said they weren’t interested in conservatives reading their magazine. The chart above tells you how well that decision worked out for them.

As I said yesterday, Newsweek‘s demise is a case of assisted suicide. They had a choice between being profitable and being liberal, and they chose liberal.

(And here’s an excuse to link to that Iowahawk piece on Newsweek again.)

ObamaCare Votes Doomed Democrats

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

I’m sure the average BattleSwarm reader came to this conclusion heretofore, but Derek Thompson provides a statistical roundup in The Atlantic that proves it. They also find lesser effects for the other three votes I’ve highlighted here (Stimulus, TARP, and Cap-and-Trade):

For Democrats in the least Democratic districts, the model suggests a loss of about 4 percent for every yes vote. If vulnerable Democrats hadn’t voted for any of the four bills, he concludes, Democrats would have won 32 more seats, enough to retain control of the House. Even after you remove TARP (which was a must-vote in scary times), the three-vote impact was 24 seats — not enough to keep the House, but close.

Although at least one study he cites shows no effect for the last that can’t be explained for the other three.

But it all comes back to what all non-liberal Americans have been telling Democrats for a year or longer: It’s the ObamaCare, stupid.