Brendan Nyhan

New at CJR: Covering facts versus scandal "narrative"

In my column today, I examine the challenges facing reporters covering the week's outbreak of scandal fever in Washington and note the need for more attention to facts. Here's how it begins:

The dilemma for journalists this week: How should you cover a series of proto-scandals with seemingly little in common? As far as we know, internal Obama administration edits of talking points about the Benghazi attacks, Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups for additional scrutiny, and the Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records aren’t part of some overarching political strategy; they don’t even involve the same administration officials. What links these events together, of course, is a new political reality: the administration is embattled by scandal for the first time since President Obama took office. Given the political circumstances, that pattern appears likely to continue.

So what should reporters do?

Read the rest to find out.

New at CJR: Backsliding on the "death panels" myth

My column last week (which I forgot to post) focused on the risk that coverage of the Independent Payment Advisory Board will reinforce the "death panels" myth. Here's how it began:

House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell released a letter on Thursday stating that they would not recommend individuals for appointment to the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), an obscure government panel created as part of the Affordable Care Act in an effort to reduce cost growth in Medicare.

Unfortunately, the board is best known as the current vehicle for the false claim that Obama’s health care plan would create “death panels,” which spread widely after Sarah Palin’s August 2009 Facebook post coining the term. As a result, journalists face a conundrum. The pervasiveness of the myth is part of the reason the partisan dispute over IPAB appointments is now newsworthy—but as I warned back in January, credulous coverage has the potential to reinforce the misperception.

Read the whole thing for more.

Why Obama is in trouble on IRS and Benghazi

After a largely scandal-free first term, President Obama appears likely to spend a lot more time mired in the politics of scandal after last week's Benghazi hearings and Friday's revelation of alleged political targeting at the IRS.

My research suggests that the structural conditions are strongly favorable for a major media scandal to emerge. First, I found that new scandals are likely to emerge when the president is unpopular among opposition party identifiers. Obama's approval ratings are quite low among Republicans (10-18% in recent Gallup surveys), which creates pressure on GOP leaders to pursue scandal allegations as well as audience demand for scandal coverage. Along those lines, John Boehner is reportedly "obsessed" with Benghazi and working closely with Darrell Issa, the House committee chair leading the investigation. You can expect even stronger pressure from the GOP base to pursue the IRS investigations given the explosive nature of the allegations and the way that they reinforce previous suspicions about Obama politicizing the federal government.

In addition, I found that media scandals are less likely to emerge as pressure from other news stories increases. Now that the Boston Marathon bombings have faded from the headlines, there are few major stories in the news, especially with gun control and immigration legislation stalled in Congress. The press is therefore likely to devote more resources and airtime/print to covering the IRS and Benghazi stories than they would in a more cluttered news environment.

Finally, Obama is in his second term, which is when scandals are most likely to take place. After several years with no scandals - the longest of any contemporary president - he had two briefly pop up in April of last year: the GSA and Secret Service scandals. But second terms are far more difficult, as this figure from the paper illustrates using predicted probabilities for a hypothetical president with representative covariate values:

Under favorable conditions like these, I argue, the mainstream media and the opposition party are more likely to engage in the "co-production" of a media scandal, which requires the participation of both parties. The opposition party can't successfully create a media scandal without sustained critical coverage in the press (see: Fast and Furious) and the media can't create a scandal without political cover from the opposition party (see: Democrats after 9/11). In this case, not only are Republicans up in arms about IRS and Benghazi, but the press is mobilizing as well - Politico already called the IRS case "[a] classic Washington scandal" and National Journal's Ron Fournier suggested Obama's credibility is in question. For the White House, things are likely to get worse before they get better.

Relevant research:
-Scandal Potential: How political context and news congestion affect the president’s vulnerability to media scandal

New at CJR: Covering 'The American Presidency'

My new CJR column is about the disjunction between the fictional powers that journalists often expect the President to possess and the reality of the chief executive's limited influence over Congress. Here's how it begins:

In Hollywood and the accounts of many of the nation’s leading journalists, events in Washington revolve around the president, who is thought to have virtually unlimited powers to cajole, charm, threaten, or bribe legislators into enacting his agenda. Within this framework, the success or failure of the president’s legislative agenda is typically attributed to his tactics, not contextual factors like party support in Congress.

In reality, the idea that the President can force an uncooperative Congress to do his bidding has been falsified over and over again—not just during President Obama’s administration on issues like gun control, but during previous presidencies. Even Lyndon Baines Johnson, the prototypical presidential wheeler-dealer, became far less persuasive when the national political climate changed after the 1966 midterm elections (one aide commented that by the end LBJ “couldn’t get Mother’s Day through” Congress). And yet journalists and commentators still try to defend their misguided notions of presidential power, suggesting instead that, for instance, Obama is being held back by a lack of personal charm or a failure to twist enough arms in Congress.

For more, read the whole thing.

New at CJR: The incentives for speed-induced errors

My new column for Columbia Journalism Review examines the incentives that helped produce the stream of media errors during last week's coverage of the Boston marathon bombings. Here's an excerpt:

Why did much of the media perform so poorly? Breaking news events have always been difficult and confusing to cover; errors are frequently made. However, the near-infinite size of the news hole that media outlets are now expected to try to fill online, on cable, and in social media, even when little new or accurate information is available, exacerbates the challenge and creates perverse incentives. With weak reputational and commercial penalties for inaccuracy—CNN’s audience reportedly tripled from the slow-news period of the week before—reporters rushed to fill the void with whatever information was available, however dubious.

Read the whole thing for more.

New at CJR: Exit interview with Politifact's Bill Adair

My new column at CJR is an interview with Politifact founder Bill Adair, who is leaving the site and the Tampa Bay Times (where he serves as White House bureau chief) for a position at Duke University. Here's an excerpt:

BN: Now seems like a good time to look back at what you’ve accomplished at PolitiFact, which has become the most influential factchecker in the business, including winning a Pulitzer Prize. What are you most proud of about your work there? And what you think the next steps are for the factchecking movement in general and specifically for PolitiFact?

BA: I’m really proud of the way we were able to expand to the states. We have 10 state PolitiFact sites in key places such as Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Virginia, where reporters for our partner news organizations do Truth-O-Meter fact-checks.

Letting someone else use our prize-winning brand was a risk. But we applied lessons from the fast food industry (conduct lots of training, provide good manuals, and do quality control checks) —and it’s worked well. Last year, the factchecking by our partners at the Cleveland Plain Dealer was really important in the U.S. Senate race.

I think PolitiFact’s next step is to keep expanding. We want to find partners in the remaining states and see if we can expand internationally. We are partnering with a respected Australian journalist to launch PolitiFact Australia later this spring. If that goes well, we’ll consider other countries.

For more, read the whole thing.

New at CJR: The most poli sci-friendly reporter

My new column at Columbia Journalism Review lauds the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Craig Gilbert for his unusual approach to covering politics, which draws far more deeply on political science than any other reporter working today. Here's how it begins:

One of the most encouraging trends in journalism over the past few years has been the tentative embrace of political science by a number of reporters and pundits. To be sure, that embrace is partial and incomplete: poli sci can still do more to inform news coverage, which still tends to rely on elite sources like pundits, operatives, and elected officials rather than academic research and the scholars who produce it. But notable journalists like The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein and David Leonhardt and Adam Liptak of The New York Times now routinely consult political scientists as sources and frame stories in ways that reflect academic insights...

The reporter who’s probably done more than anyone else to integrate political science into daily news coverage, however, actually works at a regional newspaper in the Midwest: Craig Gilbert of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Among the nearly 700 articles archived under Gilbert’s byline in the Nexis Academic database, a remarkable 16 percent mention the terms “political science” or “political scientist.” And a closer examination of this coverage over the last two years reveals that these aren’t just cursory citations or “expert” quotes that fill out stories—Gilbert’s consultation with academics frequently allows him to bring in data or findings that are neglected in mainstream political coverage.

Read the whole thing for more.

New at CJR: That’s not a factcheck!

My new column at Columbia Journalism Review discusses the problem of fact-checkers leaving the realm of verifiable evidence and weighing in on semantics and political process issues. Here's how it begins:

What, exactly, is a “serious” plan to resolve the budget impasse in Congress? It’s not clear how to define adjectives like this, but that didn’t stop Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, from weighing in with a column on Monday arguing that President Obama’s budget is “not really a plan” because Obama hasn’t offered “a sustained presidential commitment” to it, including challenging his own party and “[making] the case for overhauling entitlement programs to the American people.”

Unfortunately, Kessler’s argument is semantic, not factual, and based in his own centrist ideology—a mistake that he and other factcheckers make too frequently. Factchecking is an inherently subjective enterprise; the divide between fact and opinion is often messy and difficult to parse. As CJR’s Greg Marx argued, it is therefore essential that factcheckers like Kessler only invoke the authority of facts when assessing claims that can be resolved on evidentiary grounds, rather than straying into subjective judgments about the political process or semantic debates over terminology.

Read the whole thing for more.

New CJR: The Green Lantern Theory of Sequestration

My new column at CJR challenges the bizarre mythology among some commentators that the President can somehow make Congress agree with him on a resolution to the impasse over sequestration. Here's how it begins:

One of the recurring themes in commentary on national politics is the demand for the president to change politics as we know it to accomplish some otherwise unattainable political goal. If only President Obama tried a little harder, some critics claim, he could magically overcome legislative obstacles to gun control or clean energy legislation. I’ve dubbed this fantasy the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency in honor of the comic book superheroes whose abilities to use their “power rings” depend on their willpower.

Tuesday’s New York Times column by David Brooks on the debate over the so-called budget sequester is a case in point.

For more, read the whole thing.

New at CJR: The third party fever dream, revisited

On Friday, I wrote a column for CJR challenging journalistic assessments of the prospects for third parties, which prompted a reply from National Journal's Ron Fournier this morning. I have a new column up that responds to Fournier and offers five additional points that I think journalists should consider in assessing the prospects for successful third party challenges. Here's how it begins:

National Journal’s Ron Fournier has posted a gracious reply to my CJR column challenging what I considered to be his excessively optimistic estimates of the likelihood of a successful third party or serious third party presidential contender. I’m very encouraged by the exchange that we’ve had, which reflects the possibilities for engagement and collaboration between journalism and political science. In this case, political science research has a different perspective than the operatives and professionals, as Fournier notes.

Read the whole thing for more.

CJR: State of the Union media prebuttal

In case you missed it, here's my prebuttal to media coverage of the State of the Union, which includes a new introduction to last year's edition.

New at CJR: The third party fever dream

In my new column at CJR, I criticize the tendency for journalists to hype the prospects of third parties and third party presidential candidates. Here's how it begins:

National Journal editorial director Ron Fournier is a respected journalist with years of distinguished service as an Associated Press correspondent and editor. So why is he issuing hyperbolic warnings about how “social change and a disillusioned electorate threaten the entire two-party system”?

In a story posted online Thursday, Fournier leaps from a hypothetical 2016 third-party presidential bid by Republican senator and Tea Party favorite Rand Paul to an elaborate scenario in which the survival of the major parties is at risk. He quotes both GOP Rep. Reid Ribble and Democratic consultant Doug Sosnik predicting, in nearly identical terms, the emergence of “third and even fourth parties.”

In reality, while changes to the party structure are of course possible and third-party candidates do occasionally emerge, the rules of congressional and presidential elections create dynamics that make it extremely difficult for third-party or independent candidates to succeed in the United States—and even harder for a third party to exist as a sustained institution.

For more, read the whole thing.

New at CJR: Boosting the Sandy Hook truther myth

In my new column at CJR, I argue that the media should be wary of giving additional attention to Sandy Hook truthers, which may actually help to spread their false claims. Here's how it begins:

In the weeks since the tragic events at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, fringe conspiracy theorists have suggested that the shooting rampage there was staged or even perpetrated by the government to advance an anti-gun agenda—claims so absurd that even Glenn Beck has denounced them as preposterous.

The fact that these theories have been circulating should not surprise us; tragedies frequently give rise to anti-government conspiracy myths (9/11, Waco, etc.). More surprising—and unfortunate—is how much attention some media outlets are devoting to these claims, which have not been endorsed by any prominent politicians or commentators. While the coverage to date has generally sought to marginalize these conspiracy-mongers, it risks drawing more attention to their false claims and propagating the myth further.

For more, read the whole thing.

New at CJR: Putting bargaining positions into context

My new column at CJR covers the need for reporters to be more skeptical about politicians' expressed commitments to their beliefs during bargaining processes like the current debt ceiling showdown. Here's how it begins:

Insider reporting is vital to understanding what The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib describes as the “‘Groundhog Day’ loop of fiscal crisis, followed by rancorous partisan debate, followed by half-solution” that has come to dominate the nation’s capitol since the November election. But reporters covering the White House and Capitol Hill must be cautious of sources exaggerating how committed they are to their expressed positions in an effort to obtain greater bargaining leverage.

For more, read the whole thing.

New at CJR: Covering IPAB, avoiding "death panels"

My new column at CJR discusses the challenges facing health care journalists in covering the Independent Payment Advisory Board without reinforcing the "death panel" myth. Here's how it begins:

One of the most underrated political stories of the next year is the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (also known as the ACA), which continues to unfold at the state and federal level. It’s the sort of complex policy issue that often gets short shrift from reporters, especially in comparison to the ongoing series of dramatic confrontations between the president and congressional Republicans over the "fiscal cliff" and federal debt ceiling.

Unfortunately, one key element of the ACA—the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB)—has become entangled with the "death panel" myth about the legislation, making it an important test case for whether we can have a fact-based debate about whether and how to reduce the explosive growth of healthcare costs.

Read the whole thing for more.