Sloppiest Fact Checking: Boston Globe [incl. Sara Roy, Martin Kramer]

Our eighth annual recognition of the most skewed and biased coverage of the Mideast conflict.

Boston Globe editors didn’t bother double checking the stats when Eyad al-Sarraj and Sara Roy wrote in February:

Although Gaza daily requires 680,000 tons of flour to feed its population, Israel had cut this to 90 tons per day by November 2007, a reduction of 99 percent.

But Martin Kramer crunched the numbers, found them half-baked, then sourced the stats back to Egypt’s Ahram Weekly, writing:

You don’t need to be a math genius to figure out that if Gaza has a population of 1.5 million, as the authors also note, then 680,000 tons of flour a day come out to almost half a ton of flour per Gazan, per day.

The Globe posted a correction at the bottom of the web page, which Kramer rightfully called onto the carpet too:

The pounds-for-tons “correction” is an attempt to cover up the authors’ original sin: they just copied the figure straight from the Ahram Weekly (which anyway doesn’t use pounds--it uses metric measurements). The Boston Globe should go back to the authors and ask for the precise source of their figures. It’s called fact-checking.

Sarraj and Roy are entitled to their opinions, but even op-eds have to be based on accurate info.

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Harvard University