I love the accuracy of the two major newspapers in Tampa. One slants to the left, the other slants to the right. For that reason, some of their news stories, even when written about the same event, occasionally read like they're talking about two different things.

But I never thought politics could affect mathematics. Take, for instance, the two papers' top headlines today:

Laptop Probe Draws 51 Agents, proclaims the Tampa Tribune. The St. Petersburg Times, though, insists that 2 Laptops Draw 46 Investigators.

Reading the stories, one discovers (in the second paragraph of the Tribune's article) that fifty-one agents were assigned to the investigation, five being local and forty-six being drawn from around the world. The Times does mention the local agents down in the ninth paragraph, but begins the story with "The Air Force has assembled a team of 46 special agents". Forty-six plus five equals... anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Even more interesting, however, is the difference in the rest of the content of the articles. The Tribune plays up the seriousness of the matter — harping on the one-to-one ratio of agents to suspects — questioning whether or not the laptops were the source of information leaked to the New York Times, comparing the leak to the Pentagon Papers, and quoting Rumsfeld's memo that such leaks were putting American lives at risk. The Times downplays the seriousness of the missing laptops, and portrays the "officials" as bumbling losers who don't even know what was on the computers. They do mention the New York Times story, but don't engage in speculation about whether or not the laptops were the source of the leak.

And why should they? The New York Times story ran on July 5. The laptops were last accounted for on August 1, and reported missing on August 2. Erm, hello? How could the stolen laptops have anything to do with a story that ran nearly a month before they were stolen?

Really, where are these journalistic standards of accuracy they keep bleating on about? Oh, that's right — they went away nearly three years ago, when Peter Jennings declared that popular opinion mattered more than accuracy. Silly me.