Remember When I Said that Newspapers Should Fact Check Their Own OP/EDs?*

Well, it's finally happened, and the paper was to do it was the Kansas City Star, an unlikely journalistic innovator, but they fact checked the editorial they published from Stephen Moore, head economist at the frequently fact challenged Heritage Foundation, ^{† and} discover that he is lying through his teeth:

The Kansas City Star probably thought it was on solid ground when it published an op-ed by Stephen Moore defending the draconian, and economically debilitating, tax cuts instituted by Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. (We reported on how the tax cuts have turned Kansas into a smoking ruin here.)

Moore's conservative credentials are impeccable: A former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, he's currently chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and a familiar face on Fox News and CNBC. So when his piece asserted that "over the last five years," the no-income-tax states of Texas and Florida gained jobs while the high-tax states of New York and California lost jobs, the editors waved it through.

Moore punctuated his statistical victory over Brownback's critics with the ironic refrain "Oops."

Oops, indeed.

It turns out Moore's statistics were dead wrong. He later explained that he was citing figures from 2007-2012, not the last five years. But--oops again--he got those figures wrong too. His errors were discovered by Yael T. Abouhalkah, a Star columnist, who took the simple step of cross-checking them against the source, the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In this age of the Google machine, it would be a trivial matter for a newspaper to assign a junior reporter to fact check every statistic in every editorial that they publish on their own (syndicated editorials are a more complex matter).

In fact, any decent Googler could fact check a couple of hours.

To quote the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "'You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts."

An OP/ED should not be a license to lie.
^*Here is one example from juxtaposition the former Kaplan Test Prep company and Sarah Palin.
^†Full disclosure: I have a personal reason for hating the ratf%$#s at the Heritage Foundation. They fired a friend of mine for having cancer.