Hey, John Lott is back in the news! Remember him? Chris Brown of Media Matters catches him retroactively changing a blog post and then complaining that he was misquoted. Luckily, Chris kept a screen shot of the original, always a useful precaution when dealing with Lott.
For what it’s worth, Lott is famous in the blogosphere for conducting a gun survey that nobody else could duplicate and then claiming that literally every trace of evidence that he’d actually conducted the survey was missing. He’s also famous for using a sock puppet named Mary Rosh, who popped up in discussion threads and lavishly praised Lott whenever he was criticized.
But for my money, his biggest sin came in 2003, when he surreptitiously made retroactive changes to a dataset to make it look as if the modified version was the one he’d been using all along. I summarized all this in EZ-to-follow bullet points here. Chris Mooney talked to Lott for Mother Jones here. It’s a nice trip down memory lane. Making changes and then backdating them is an old MO for Lott, so his latest antics come as no surprise.