I betcha Old Ralphie is trying to pull a fast one to save a little face.
According to today’s column in the Budgeteer he’s written that his column beating Gary Glass and me up for our emails generated more email comment than any other column he’s written in either Ohio (the state he’s lived in away from Duluth for most of the last two decades) or Duluth in a five year period. That must be quite some flood of email because I’ve heard him claim other columns generated lots of response as well.
I’ve also heard him claim about one previous Red Plan column that he didn’t know how popular the plan was until he written his column because apparently the email that was sent to him afterward overwhelmingly agreed with his position that the show must go on. He didn’t make that claim this time.
What he did do this time was create the illusion that everyone agreed with him. He did this by cherry picking passages from this flood of emails – ten examples of which he shared – to suggest that they overwhelmingly backed up his position. Of the ten, eight were complimentary – 80%. Two, (both from teachers interestingly) were critical. By showing the critical ones Dr. Doty gives the impression of giving his readers a fair representation of the flood.
But, if Dr. Doty got a flood of email for a column read by (oh, let’s just take a wild guess) 25,000 people he might have gotten (Oh, let’s take another wild guess) 80 emails. If eight of them were positive and 72 of them were not Ralph would have enough positives to give the impression that folks agreed with him. He could print all eight that were supportive and only print 2 of the 72 emails that that disagreed with him and create the false positive impression that he was supported by a ratio of 5 to 1.
Did Ralph do this – The Ralph Doty who regularly sermonizes that its important to tell the truth? There’s only one way to know. Release your email Dr. Doty, including your replies to your critics. I bet they would make interesting reading.
