Reading the same information and coming to different conclusions

By Jay Warren
WSLS10 Anchor
Published: February 18, 2008

It is interesting to see how people can look at the same set of facts and come to completely different conclusions. I had a blaring example of this last week.

During our primary coverage, I mentioned how impressed I was with Mike Huckabee’s performance in Virginia. He did better than expected and for a time seemed to make the contest a real race. I even noted how impressive the evangelical vote was for Huckabee. To me, it seemed evangelicals showed up and powered Huckabee’s rise. It wasn’t enough to make him the winner, but to me it was impressive nonetheless. In fact, I did a “Winners & Losers” entry on my blog, putting evangelicals and Huckabee in the winner category.

The following day I read Chris Cillizza’s column on the Washington Post’s website. Everything I have read from him is reasoned and fair. I have not detected any bias. He’s a good reporter. But, he looked at the Virginia returns and came up with a completely different analysis. In fact, in his “Winners & Losers” column, he listed evangelicals in the loser category, mentioning that they didn’t have enough momentum to push Huckabee over the finish line with a win.

You could look at the situation and probably say both interpretations are correct, it just depends on how you look at the data.