News Day

The Minnesota Compass annual meeting was packed with positive messages. Yes, we still have an achievement gap, unemployment, and various problems throughout the state — but Minnesota knows what to do to overcome these problems, and, by golly, we're moving on up! (Or, as the title of the meeting put it, "positioning ourselves for prosperity.")MORE »

Lots of people* have been credited with saying, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics." Doesn't matter who said it — there are plenty of lies and damn lies to go around, and far too many end up in news articles.

Last week, the New York Times Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane, asked whether the newspaper should be a "truth vigilante." His concern was when, if ever, "news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about."MORE »

The Environmental Protection Agency just released new information on who's spewing what, complete with searchable maps. For a data nerd, they're an almost irresistible game — plug in your state and the type of industry, and it pops up on the map, complete with the amount of each type of greenhouse gas emitted in 2010. MORE »

The horse race is getting covered 24/7 in exhaustive and ridiculous detail, with earnest anchors analyzing who’s ahead in the Iowa polls, who’s ahead among registered Republicans in Iowa, who's ahead among Iowa registered Republicans with more than three children and a car at least seven years old. On January 4, they'll move on to the post-mortem: Was it a mistake for Newt Gingrich to call Mitt Romney a liar? Would it help to run more negative ads earlier in New Hampshire or fewer negative ads later in South Carolina? If Michele Bachmann had spelled her first name with a double "l," would she have won more votes?MORE »