Brendan Nyhan

Media Matters flags a terrible example of “he said,” “she said” journalism in this Washington Post story:

The Washington Post uncritically quoted a voter’s assertion — apparently referring to a chain email containing a photograph of Sen. Barack Obama standing, but without his hand over his heart — that “[f]rom what I can tell, if he becomes president he will refuse to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.”

Would the Post reprint someone saying the sun rotates around the earth without saying the claim is false? What’s especially ridiculous, as Media Matters points out, is that the Post’s fact checker blog already debunked the Obama Pledge of Allegiance myth.

On the upside, however, the New York Times has finally called John McCain on his distortions of Democratic health care plans — the lede of the “Check Point” feature is remarkably unhedged for political coverage in a major American newspaper:

Senator John McCain has been repeatedly suggesting that his Democratic rivals are proposing a single-payer, or even a nationalized health care system along the lines of those in countries like Canada and Britain.

The suggestion is incorrect.

Jon Chait makes the counterintuitive argument that Barack Obama’s refusal to pander on the summer gas tax holiday will actually help him, but I think he omits a key factor: Obama will be proved right if a holiday is enacted and prices at the pump don’t fall much or at all this summer. (It might be true that prices would have be a bit higher in the absence of the gas tax holiday, but people have a hard time with counterfactuals.)

In the main political science model of presidential pandering, one of the key variables is whether the policy will be revealed as having succeeded or failed before the election. The finding is that presidents will only pander to public opinion when they are marginally popular and believe the public is unlikely to find out about the policy’s success until after the election.

In that framework, Clinton’s position makes perfect sense — the Democratic primary contest will be over before the failure of the gas tax holiday would become clear — but McCain’s position seems irrational. It only makes sense if he believes (a) Congress won’t pass a gas tax holiday and/or (b) the public won’t be able to tell if it succeeds or fails.

Brit Hume, the Washington managing editor of Fox News, makes up a “fact” to fit a narrative he wants to promote:

All of a sudden, the once-frosty relationship between Fox News and the Democratic candidates seems to have grown warmer. Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama, who steadfastly refused to attend Fox-sponsored debates last year, are now giving plenty of interviews as they court Fox’s viewers, who are largely white, conservative and undecided.

“It’s probably true that we appeal to white working-class voters,” said Brit Hume, the network’s Washington managing editor and the host of “Special Report.” “The candidates are going where the voters are.”

In fact, however, Fox’s audience is far more affluent than the working class:

The regular cable news viewer can be personified as a married, middle-aged man who has at least 14 years of education. He earns well, with a median income of $62,000, and tends to live in the suburbs. He has a high degree of hard-news consumption, and that links to his moderately high knowledge of current affairs. He is fairly adaptive to technology (more likely than other news consumers to own a PDA, iPod or Tivo). Compared to viewers of other media, the cable news viewer earns more (local and network news viewers have a median income of $45,000) and is also much more adaptive to technology. He is also younger than viewers of network news (who are nearly 53 years of age). The average cable viewer is 47.5, and there are only marginal differences by channel.

…Fox News viewers are the oldest at 48.7 years, followed by CNN (47.1) and MSNBC (46.5). Of the three, the CNN viewers have the lowest median income, $45,000 a year. In contrast, both MSNBC and Fox News viewers make $62,000.

A median income of $62,000 with an older audience (which means lots of retired people) means the people watching Fox News aren’t that working class.

Media Matters documents more suggestions that Barack Obama is a traitor, which this time come from (who else?) Ann Coulter:

On the April 30 edition of CNN Headline News’ Glenn Beck program, conservative pundit Ann Coulter asked of Sen. Barack Obama: “Is Obama a Manchurian candidate to normal Americans who love their country? … Or is he being the Manchurian candidate to the traitor wing of the Democratic Party?” Host Glenn Beck did not challenge Coulter’s remarks.

Coulter has previously referred to Obama as “B. Hussein Obama” in the past and called him “President Hussein.” She has also compared Obama to Adolf Hitler, calling Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, a “dimestore Mein Kampf.”

Coulter is not the first media figure to apply the “Manchurian candidate” label to Obama. On February 26, conservative radio host Bill Cunningham both referred to Obama as “this Manchurian candidate” and asserted, “I do not believe Barack Hussein Obama is a terrorist or a Manchurian candidate.” On February 25, Time magazine political analyst Mark Halperin posted a list titled “Things McCain Can Do to Try to Beat Obama That Clinton Cannot,” on his website The Page, in which he suggested that McCain “can …[e]mphasize Barack Hussein Obama’s unusual name and exotic background through a Manchurian Candidate prism.”

During her appearance, Coulter also suggested that Obama “secretly agrees with the Weathermen and the Reverend Wright faction.”

Sadly, this kind of garbage has taken a toll on Obama’s public image:

Mr. Obama has vulnerabilities. Only 29 percent of registered voters said they considered him “very patriotic,” compared with 40 percent who described Mrs. Clinton that way. Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, was considered “very patriotic” by 70 percent of the registered voters.

For more on Coulter, see our extensive writings about her at Spinsanity as well as my posts on her here.

Update 5/2 10:26 AM: In comments, Rob makes the fair point that we can’t be sure about whether these smears have had a causal inference on perceptions of Obama’s patriotism. That is true. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine they’re not having an effect.

Apologies for the pirate snafu, which seems to be over. If you went to brendan-nyhan.com in the last two days, you saw one of my “Pirate Captain” posts instead of the regular homepage (that’s why Google is currently displaying an awesome banner ad for a pirate website in the left sidebar). I still have no idea what happened but Typepad seems to have fixed the problem. Anyway, if you missed any posts while things were screwed up, please read down from here.

Matthew Yglesias comments on the need for Democratic superdelegates to make up their mind:

Ambinder says “given that undecided superdelegates have said that their primary criterion for determining who they’ll choose is who has the best chance of beating John McCain in the fall, there’s no real reason for those superdelegates to choose in June. They’ll have MORE information about electability in July or August… so why choose in an environment with less info?”

Well, I’d say the reason is that we’re not really gaining more information as time goes on (Clinton backers, for example, were making the Wright/Ayers anti-Obama argument to pundits and no doubt superdelegates as well quietly for months before it “hit” the mainstream). What’s happening, instead, is that both candidates’ negatives are going up while resources aren’t being applied against John McCain. Insofar as superdelagates genuinely want to pick a winner, they’ll recognize that picking someone gives them a better chance of winning than does a summer of indecision.

This is actually a well-known decision-making anomaly that is described in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, an entertaining pop economics book with many of the same virtues and flaws as Freakonomics. Ariely tells the story of “Buridian’s ass” to illustrate how we often fail to account for the costs of indecision:

[C]hoosing between two things that are similarly attractive is one of the most difficult decisions we can make. This is a situation not just of keeping options open for too long, but of being indecisive to the point of paying for our decision in the end. Let me use the following story to explain.

A hungry donkey approaches a barn one day looking for hay and discovers two haystacks of identical size at the two opposite ends of the barn. The donkey stands in the middle of the barn between the two haystacks, not knowing which to select. Hours go by, but he still can’t make up his mind. Unable to decide, the donkey eventually dies of starvation.

You can see any superdelegate stalling after early June in the same way. Despite the questions I’ve raised about Hillary’s electability, the fact is that the political fundamentals (the state of the economy and the war in Iraq) matter far more than candidate quality. But the process of voters converging to the decisions implied by those fundamentals may not begin until the Democrats pick a candidate. As such, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that picking either candidate in June is preferable to waiting longer in the hopes of making the “right” decision.

Given Barack Obama’s well-known weaknesses among downscale white men, his campaign seems to be trying to use sports to help him appear to be more of a regular guy. In addition to playing more basketball on the campaign trail (he’s reportedly pretty good), Obama appeared on a local sports talk station this morning here in the Triangle and did an interview almost exclusively about sports — UNC basketball, the White Sox, the Bears, etc. It’s a good bet that he’s doing more of these sorts of appearances across the board.

Update 4/30 10:02 AM: Obama was also scheduled to appear on the podcast of ESPN’s Bill Simmons but the company made a decision not to feature either candidate during the primaries.

Update 4/30 1:59 PM: Along the same lines, here’s Obama trying to take Tyler Hansborough to the hole in a pickup game at UNC yesterday morning:

For the record, Josh Marshall is once again wrong in describing the new DNC ad against John McCain as “[c]ompletely honest.” McCain said he’d be ok with US troops staying in Iraq 100 years “[a]s long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” That may be unrealistic, but the ad omits the relevant context, suggesting that McCain is proposing staying for 100 more years of conflict at the current level:

During his appearance on “Meet the Press,” DNC chairman Howard Dean was forced to admit what McCain actually said, but it’s not in the ad.

Update 4/30 10:06 AM — More flailing spin from Marshall here:

As you’ll remember, there was some jousting a few weeks back over whether it was accurate to say that McCain is willing to continue the ‘war’ in Iraq for 50 or 100 years. This is because McCain adds the caveat that it’s fine with him because he thinks that the occupation will soon be like our longstanding presence in Germany, Japan and Korea in which we have a substantial troop presence but no soldiers dying in hostile action since the population and governments are content to have us there. So is it really ‘war’ or only ‘occupation’ or ‘presence’?

Once again, Marshall is acknowledging the missing context and then raising second-order questions that don’t justify the content of the ad.

Update 4/30 5:00 PM — Via Yglesias, more of the same in a new ad from MoveOn:

Chris Matthews, who was last seen critiquing the way Barack Obama ordered orange juice in a diner, is now
obsessed with the idea that Obama can’t connect with people in a diner:

A week after claiming that Sen. Barack Obama “can’t walk into a dinette [sic] with five or six guys there, white guys, in some cases. He can’t just shake hands and hang out,” Chris Matthews asserted, “[Obama] doesn’t seem to have the knack for walking into a dinette [sic] with regular people in it and just having fun, just connecting.”

How does Matthews know this? How many diners, exactly, has he been in with Obama? And more importantly, why do we care?

This is the same silly script the press used in its 2000 coverage of Al Gore, which often described him as a wonky elitist who couldn’t “connect” with regular people. While it’s certainly true that neither is a natural retail politician like Bill Clinton or Bill Richardson, the point is that the facts are fit to the narrative just as they were with Gore. Matthews is almost certainly extrapolating from a few clips he’s seen of campaign stops based on the “Democrats=elitists” frame that is embedded in his mind.

For some reason, my main page is defaulting to a 2006 post about the attempted impeachment of the NC State student body president known as the “Pirate Captain.” Not sure what’s going on — maybe there are some pirate hackers out there? Anyway, I’ve asked Typepad for help, but in the meantime, just click on the “Main” link or my name at the top to go to the latest posts (here’s the link).