Their “About” page says that Media Matters is “a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.” Basically, they’re what you’d call a watchdog group, keeping an eye on liars who worm their way into American media. Liars like good ol’ boy John Lott, who we’ve run into many times before spouting misinformation. You know the “more guns, less crime” myth? That’s Johnny Lott.
Now, he did just show up in the ABC News piece that we posted about a few days ago, but now Media Matters is calling him out for a New York Times editorial he wrote. The editorial had to do with a “study” Lott recently wrote that, he claimed, shows the American Bar Association’s clearly liberal bias. But while that case doesn’t have much to do with guns, Media Matters puts forth a clear case that Lott shouldn’t have much to do with statistics.
The January 25 edition of The New York Times featured an op-ed by John R. Lott Jr., a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in which Lott cited a “recently completed study” of the American Bar Association’s (ABA) ratings for federal district and circuit court nominees to allege that the “association’s liberal bias on its evaluations is there for all to see.” In spite of Lott’s long record of dishonesty and misinformation in his scholarly works, The New York Times allowed him to trumpet his “new” study — completed December 2004 — on its opinion page.
As Media Matters for America previously noted, Lott has been caught using fraudulent data, has been accused of lying about it to cover his tracks, and of using a fake Internet persona to hype his own falsified work. Lott claims to have conducted a 1997 survey on defensive gun usage, but evidence strongly suggests he never conducted it. A February 11, 2003, Washington Post article noted that Lott’s “critics are asking: What national survey? Lott has been unable to produce the poll data, which he says were lost when his computer crashed.” Lott also misrepresented the findings of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on voter disenfranchisement in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.
Looks to us like “fradulent data” and John Lott go hand in hand. The guy’s got more fake numbers on him than an Enron financial report. And so when he says something as inane as “concealed handgun laws reduce violent crime”, it’s pretty hard to take him seriously. In fact, it’s impossible to take him seriously. Because, let’s face it, this guy’s a liar.
Unfortunately, par for the course for gun lobby flacks. The next time you hear “more guns, less crime” or “if we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns,” be careful you consider the source.
