I’ve got stereotypes.  We all have ’em.  It’s one of the ways humans process the nearly infinite number of permutations of human behavior into a mentally-manageable size.

For example, intellectually I know that journalists behave in as many differnet ways as there are journalists.  Indeed, they may be have in up to double the number of ways as there are journos – because not a few journalists behave completely differently in their personal and vocational lives.  I do know this, in my brain.

But the stereotype I have is that journos, drawn as they are largely from the strata of society that is wired to be “progressives”, trained at institutions whose general left-leaning bias has always been omnipresent, especially in the departments (journalism, humanities and social and zephyr-soft sciences) that tend to spawn journos, and who work their entire careers in, and develop entire networks of sources and colleagues and social lives among, institutions that tend to be left of center – government, academia, the activist community and the like, will, when in doubt and the chips are down, swerve left.  Maybe not intentially (although some do), maybe just as a result of confirmation bias (as many do) – but to the left they do indeed swerve.

And part of the stereotype is that that those stereotypical liberally-marinated journos will pick the parts of “the truth” that fit their worldview – aka “confirmation bias” – and pass it along as the unvarnished truth.  Not maliciously, usually, but with absolute certainty that they, or people like them, are indeed the fonts of the absolute indisputable truth.

Which brings us to Erik Black at the MinnPost who, er, minnposted an article the other day  entitled, as luck would have it, Stereotypical Thinking About Political Parties Is Often Just Flat Inaccurate.

When it comes to race, gender and ethnicity, we are urged to guard against stereotypical thinking. But how about when it comes to presidents? How about when it comes to political parties?

Stereotypical thinking about political parties is extremely powerful and often highly misleading, unfair and just flat inaccurate.

As a gun-owning custody-reform-advocating pro-life conservative who is frequently called a violent insecure wife-beating woman-hating uneducated dummy, I could hardly agree more.

So far.

But then Black follows it with

Read the following sentences slowly and carefully.

Scoring the last eight presidential terms according to the spending that occurred under the budget signed by that president, federal spending increased at the fastest rate during the first Reagan term (an increase of 8.7%). It went up the second fastest during the second term of George W. Bush (8.1%). It went up the slowest during the current term of Barack Obama (1.4%.) The second and third slowest periods of federal spending growth occurred under the two terms of Bill Clinton.

These numbers from this piece by Rex Nutting who writes for MarketWatch, which is an arm of the Wall Street Journal. They are based on Congressional Budget Office numbers.

And there, in turn, is a bit of stereotyping from Black; as if the Wall Street Journal byline makes it conservative, ergo against Black’s interest.  It’s just not always so – but, again, that’s why stereotypes exist.

In case you don’t click through, here are the graphics from Nutting/MarketWatch:

..

And since it comes from MarketWatch and the WSJ – journalists! – it must be accurate, right?  It must have compared apples with apples throughout – ya?

You know where this is leading – right?

MarketWatch’s Nutting did not compare apples with apples, but rather swerved between CBO figures and Obama’s own numbers for no apparent reason but with the result, mirabile dictu, of inflating Bush’s (as opposed to his Democrat Congress’) spending and lowering Obama’s in comparison, and uses CBO numbers that are known to be wildly inaccruate.

And he has an infographic of his own.   It’s below the jump (because it’s very, very long)

It might be stereotypical to think that Black, a liberal working for a site published by a longtime liberal activist and which employs a stable of other liberals, is slopping Nutting’s apparently-faulty article out there because it confirms his own biases.

Indeed, thinking that about a journalist would be, well, stereotypical of me.

But behind stereotype there is always a grain – sometimes a basketball-sized grain – of truth.  Journalists are mostly liberals.  Conservatives do believe that journalists serve – intentionally or not – Democrats first, then accuracy and truth.

And liberals do spend money like crack whores with stolen Platinum cards.

Let’s remember this come Dayton’s next budget. shall we?