Brendan Nyhan

Ann Althouse posted video from the Dartmouth blog panel shot with her laptop camera — you can hear (but not see) what I said about the Tim Kaine/eyebrow story being picked up by the Columbus Dispatch starting at 0:41 of the clip:

The Progress Report subject line in today’s email (PDF): “Credebility Lost” (sic). Yes indeed.

It’s kind of neat that the AP story the New York Times ran yesterday about the pregnancy of Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), who will become just the fifth woman to give birth while serving in Congress, pays no heed to the timeline of when, exactly, she got pregnant.

Rogers married in August and her baby is due in May. In the old days, the possibility that a conservative Congresswoman had gotten pregnant before she was married might have been a scandal. But now it’s widely recognized that the circumstances are none of our business and the AP treats it as such.

Sometimes you can tell norms are changing as much by what’s not included in news coverage as by what is.

PS: Why does another version of the AP story refer to the pregnancy as a “blessed event”? Isn’t that kind of explicitly religious language inappropriate for a wire story?

Via Jason Zengerle at The Plank, Joe Biden is blaming Republicans for, well, just about everything:

I would argue, since 1994 with the Gingrich revolution, just take a look at Iraq, Venezuela, Katrina, what’s gone down at Virginia Tech, Darfur, Imus. Take a look. This didn’t happen accidentally, all these things.

You can argue that the response of Bush or the GOP to Hugo Chavez, Katrina, or Darfur has been inadequate, but how is the “Gingrich revolution” responsible for Virginia Tech or Imus? More fundamentally, note that Biden says “This didn’t happen accidentally, all these things” (my italics) — he’s holding Republicans responsible for the occurrence of hurricanes, foreign dictators, and racial slurs on the radio (among other things).

Maybe Biden has been reading Larry Bartels, a distinguished political scientist at Princeton, who believes that voters hold politicians responsible for so-called “acts of God” like bad weather and shark attacks. Here’s part of a 2004 segment from PBS’s “Newshour with Jim Lehrer” that quotes Bartels:

PAUL SOLMAN: [T]here’s a third way to look at the election: That voters are largely irrational. Political scientist Larry Bartels’ research suggests voters may confuse acts of God, like droughts and floods, with acts of the president.

LARRY BARTELS: We looked at data from the weather service over the whole 20th century, and there’s a pretty strong pattern of incumbents doing less well in particular election years in particular states where things have been either too wet or too dry.

PAUL SOLMAN: Too wet or too dry?

LARRY BARTELS: Yes.

PAUL SOLMAN: In fact, Bartels thinks the extreme inclemency of the year 2000 cost the Democrats the White House, much as President Woodrow Wilson’s reelection was threatened by the famous New Jersey shore shark attacks of 1916. The government had moved quickly to counterattack and keep people out of the water back then, but…

LARRY BARTELS: People along the shore were unhappy about the fact that Wilson wasn’t doing anything to control the shark attacks and were more likely to vote against him as a result.

In short, there may be a method to Biden’s madness. Sadly.

My nomination for
the most inane response to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s statement that he believes the war in Iraq is “lost”:

Representative Peter Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican, said: “If Harry Reid believes that this war is lost, where is his plan to win this war?”

What part of “lost” does Hoekstra not understand?

I didn’t think what I said during the Dartmouth blog panel was hard to parse, but the Manchester Union-Leader managed to completely screw it up.

First, here’s the Dartmouth newspaper’s report, which is accurate:

Brendan Nyhan, who started the non-partisan blog Spinsanity, disagreed that much had changed.

“There is really a paradox to blogging,” Nyhan said. “On one hand it’s opened up, but on the other hand the group of people who are being read the most look a lot like the old [journalists]. The group is dominated by ex-journalists and people in information age industries.”

…Nyhan said that, despite predictions that blogging would lessen partisanship and hold politicians and mainstream media accountable for what they say, the new blogs have increased partisanship and most fact-checking that goes on in blogs is ideologically slanted.

“Who’s going to spend the time to update every day? The people who have a strong desire to do so because they really care,” Nyhan said, saying earlier that he “could have made more money working for Starbucks.”

“The people who blog are pretty extreme. The political blog looks like a food fight on TV,” he added.

[Roger L.] Simon said that he believed fact-checking on blogs to be more extensive than newspapers. He used the example of an article he wrote for The Los Angeles Times about a Siberian Film Festival, where the fact-checker simply asked him if the story was accurate and accepted Simon’s response. According to Simon, every blog reader is a fact-checker because readers who see errors can easily post responses so Simon could make corrections.

Most of the panelist did not see the blogs and the mainstream media as two forces locked in combat with each other. Many believed that reporting was still necessary and that blogging was meant to complement, rather than compete with, other sources of news.

“No one is going to say, ‘I don’t want to read The New York Times,’” Nyhan said. “A lot of media that came along hasn’t killed other media. Newspapers and radios are still around.”

But the Union Leader correspondent described me as being enthusiastic about blog fact-checking and characterized Simon as agreeing with me — the exact opposite of what we actually said:

Most of the panelist[s] agreed, however, that because of the specialized nature of blogs, the medium doesn’t threaten to replace newspapers or radio anytime soon. In terms of accuracy, though, some blogs may be able to provide a higher level of reliability than traditional media outlets, simply because of the diverse and knowledgeable audience that can point out errors with the click of a mouse, contended Brendan Nyhan, co-founder of the fact-checking political blog Spinsanity.

The commentary found on blogs elevates content to a level above the “he said, she said” political reporting in newspapers, Nyhan said.

“No newspaper or magazine can afford the level of fact-checking that you get with a blog that has thousands of readers,” Simon agreed.

Just to clarify the point, I said that blogs have the potential to be better fact-checkers than newspapers, which rely far too heavily on “he said,” “she said” reporting. (We made this argument in the conclusion of All the President’s Spin.) However, I said that they have largely failed to fulfill that potential. Most of the alleged “fact-checking” of politicians and pundits on blogs consists of disguised ideological attacks. It’s true, as Simon pointed out, that blogs are better at correcting their own factual errors than newspapers, but their fact-checking of others is generally overhyped.

How do you know Fred Thompson is going to run for president? Like Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, Thompson is endorsing the false claim that tax cuts increase revenue. Check out how many times he hits the talking point in this Wall Street Journal op-ed (italics mine):

The results of the experiment that began when Congress passed a series of tax-rate cuts in 2001 and 2003 are in. Supporters of those cuts said they would stimulate the economy. Opponents predicted ever-increasing budget deficits and national bankruptcy unless tax rates were increased, especially on the wealthy.

In fact, Treasury statistics show that tax revenues have soared and the budget deficit has been shrinking faster than even the optimists projected. Since the first tax cuts were passed, when I was in the Senate, the budget deficit has been cut in half.

Remarkably, this has happened despite the financial trauma of 9/11 and the cost of the War on Terror. The deficit, compared to the entire economy, is well below the average for the last 35 years and, at this rate, the budget will be in surplus by 2010.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this success story is where the increased revenues are coming from. Critics claimed that across-the-board tax cuts were some sort of gift to the rich but, on the contrary, the wealthy are paying a greater percentage of the national bill than ever before.

…Unfortunately, the tax cuts that have produced our record-breaking government revenues and personal incomes will expire soon. Because Congress has failed to make them permanent, we are facing the worst tax hike in our history. Already, worried investors are trying to figure out what the financial landscape will look like in 2011 and beyond.

…To face these challenges, and any others that we might encounter in a hazardous world, we need to maintain economic growth and healthy tax revenues. That is why we need to reject taxes that punish rather than reward success. Those who say they want a “more progressive” tax system should be asked one question:

Are you really interested in tax rates that benefit the economy and raise revenue–or are you interested in redistributing income for political reasons?

Who are you going to believe — a Law & Order actor or the entire economics profession, including multiple Bush administration economists?

Via Ezra Klein and Think Progress, Karl Rove tried to resuscitate the old tactic of associating the Iraq war with 9/11 in Ohio yesterday. Luckily, the Akron Beacon Journal gave him the smackdown:

In a question-and-answer period after his speech, Rove was asked whose idea it was to start a pre-emptive war in Iraq.

“I think it was Osama bin Laden’s,” Rove replied.

Bin Laden was based in Afghanistan when he orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. Bush acknowledged last year that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, but the president portrays the Iraq war as the front line of the global war on terror.

We wrote extensively about this tactic in Chapter 8 and Chapter 10 of All the President’s Spin. The White House largely got away with it in 2003 and 2004, so it’s great to see the press doing a better job this time around.

Did you remember that Rudy Giuliani said in December 2001 that “there was some divine guidance in the president being elected”? I didn’t. Guess it’s time to add him to the long list of people who lost their minds after 9/11…

The panel went, well, fine. It was surprisingly non-controversial. Talking about how and why people blog sometimes feels like navel-gazing to me, but the audience seemed interested and my fellow panelists were all very friendly.

Most importantly, I did manage to work in one of the highlights of my blog career — a silly post that led to my blog being named “the site for chatter about ‘Tim Kaine’s crazy eyebrow’” by the Columbus Dispatch. I’m so proud.