"There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book."
From this article:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_ill...
The first half I believe comes from John Taylor Gatto's analysis of the 1993 National Adult Literacy Survey:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/3j.htm
Which he shouldn't have been using in 2008, because the 2003 data had already been released well before at that point. The primary source is here:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=93275
The next two statistics seem to originate from this article:
http://parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cf...
However, if you read it you'll notice that A) Almost none of the claims are sourced and B) many of them contradict each other C) They completely contradict the data from the government's survey on citizen's participation in literature and the arts: http://www.nea.gov/pub/readingatrisk.pdf.
Thus, leading me to believe that most of the 'statistics' are in fact entirely apocryphal to begin with.
"In a third post from mid-2011 titled "Basketball and Jazz," one of Lehrer's paragraphs closely paralleled one written by Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley some three years earlier.
"Lehrer:
"The rebounding experiment went like this: 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters, plus a group of complete basketball novices, watched video clips of a player attempting a free throw. (You can watch the videos here.) Not surprisingly, the professional athletes were far better at predicting whether or not the shot would go in. While they got it right more than two-thirds of the time, the non-playing experts (i.e., the coaches and writers) only got it right about 40 percent of the time.
"Newsweek:
"In the experiment, 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters (considered non-playing experts), and novices all watched a video clip of someone attempting a free throw. The players were better at predicting whether the shot would go in: they got it right in two-thirds of the shots they saw, compared to 40 percent right for novices and 44 percent for coaches and writers.
"Tellingly, Begley misstated the number of participants in the study. (There were only 5 coaches and 5 sportswriters, not 10 of each. In addition, there were also 10 people in the novice group who were neither coaches nor sportswriters.) Lehrer made the exact same mistake in precisely the same manner."
When Lehrer reproduces someone else's mistake, you know he isn't looking up or verifying the facts himself. The honorable thing to do in a blog would be simply to link to Begley's piece and say, "Sharon Begley wrote an interesting article a few years ago about a study on this issue."
P.S. I posted an article to HN earlier about the initial discovery of Lehrer making up quotations in articles in other publications.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4370417
I had also seen him "recycle" earlier writings of his in paid publications, because once one of his articles was submitted here to HN, and I thought, "Hey, I've read this before." Indeed I had, in the previous publication where he had first written on the same subject a couple years earlier.