From: Macinac Center
Cherry-picked language paints a different picture
Last week, The Guardian, a United Kingdom-based news organization, published an article that cherry-picked language from a 2015 U.S. government report that referenced our cigarette smuggling research.
Nearly four years ago, the government report’s description of our study and its findings seemed too trivial to mount any public explanation of it. Indeed, it read to us like a standard operating statement by scholars who felt compelled to explain why their results were different from others. It’s common for the authors of a scholarly article to compare various models, explain how their modeling choices affect how they discuss the issue at hand, and note how their findings differ from other recent studies. The authors of the government study did all this, and we enjoyed their contribution to the scholarship on cigarette taxes and smuggling, and we have cited their study many times in our subsequent work
