Professors are supposed to present the conclusions they've come to from their studies and work with no "self-awareness" filtering to avoid hurting anybody's feelings. Doubly so in an article, which is not a scholarly paper, and is meant to represent a broader picture with broader strokes.
And being a professor is not about only presenting raw factoids. It's also about drawing conclusions from the data and pointing to the bigger picture the way you interpret them -- a bigger picture that no data are going to give you by themselves alone. Informing the public opinion is not about being a glorified statistician.
Of course nobody would have batted an eye if a processor had done exactly the same kind of "stating of facts" for opinions they like (and that goes for "righteous indignation" both sides, left and right).
I think in the world of economics, those are very fuzzy lines. Economics and law are full of conjecture, the belief that if one thing is true, others will probably be as well (see supply-side economics, Marxism, and so on), and the amount those views are clung to despite existing data is startling. I don't agree with the conclusions she comes to, but it's not a huge jump from what economists the Krugman do all the time.
And being a professor is not about only presenting raw factoids. It's also about drawing conclusions from the data and pointing to the bigger picture the way you interpret them -- a bigger picture that no data are going to give you by themselves alone. Informing the public opinion is not about being a glorified statistician.
Of course nobody would have batted an eye if a processor had done exactly the same kind of "stating of facts" for opinions they like (and that goes for "righteous indignation" both sides, left and right).