Brendan Nyhan

The coming swine flu shot myths

The grim news from the New York Times yesterday is that the swine flu vaccine is likely to cause an outbreak of misperceptions about its consequences for people's health:

As soon as swine flu vaccinations start next month, some people getting them will drop dead of heart attacks or strokes, some children will have seizures and some pregnant women will miscarry.

But those events will not necessarily have anything to do with the vaccine. That poses a public relations challenge for federal officials, who remember how sensational reports of deaths and illnesses derailed the large-scale flu vaccine drive of 1976.

This time they are making plans to respond rapidly to such events and to try to reassure a nervous public — and headline-hunting journalists — that the vaccine is not responsible.

Every year, there are 1.1 million heart attacks in the United States, 795,000 strokes and 876,000 miscarriages, and 200,000 Americans have their first seizure. Inevitably, officials say, some of these will happen within hours or days of a flu shot...

Officials are particularly worried about spontaneous miscarriages, because they are urging pregnant women to be among the first to be vaccinated. Pregnant women are usually advised to get flu shots, because they and their fetuses are at high risk of flu complications, but this year the pressure is greater...

“There are about 2,400 miscarriages a day in the U.S.,” said Dr. Jay C. Butler, chief of the swine flu vaccine task force at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “You’ll see things that would have happened anyway. But the vaccine doesn’t cause miscarriages. It also doesn’t cause auto accidents, but they happen.”

Unfortunately, human beings are terrible at counterfactual thinking -- in this case, assessing what would have happened without the shot. That hasn't changed since 1976, but the problem is likely to be much worse this time around for several reasons:

-The scale of the problem is much worse (the swine flu is already a global pandemic).
-Many people have been influenced by the false claim that childhood vaccines are responsible for the increase in autism diagnoses (among other things).
-Every crazy story blaming the vaccine for heart attacks, miscarriages, etc. will be spread around the world via cable news and the Internet within hours.

But what I'm really worried about is the possibility that an anti-vaccine backlash will become an ideological issue. Glenn Beck asked his audience Monday night "Am I going to allow the government to give my child a flu shot? ... I have already made my decision, but everyone has to make their own decision ... Who will allow their children to be given a flu shot by this government?" Given the frenzied opposition to President Obama on the right, it's likely that the vaccination campaign will be portrayed as some sort of socialist plot.

The politics of inflatable gorillas

Via an NPR story on Houston, one of the great news ledes of all time:

The constitutional right to have a giant inflatable gorilla in a bathing suit and sunglasses grabbing consumer attention from a Houston business rooftop is the key issue in a trial that began in federal court on Wednesday.

Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom... to display things like this:

God bless America!

Update 9/29 4:52 PM -- Sarah Cook has an awesome tweet linking to this post:

First they came for the giant inflatable gorillas, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a giant inflatable gorilla: http://tr.im/A8Ke

Cook on the House: Focus on districts

In a comment on my post about the 2010 midterms yesterday, Charlie Cook protests the "lack of focus on actual Congressional districts":

What I find interesting about this whole conversation is the lack of focus on actual Congressional districts. When you look at the 84 CD's currently held by Democrats, that went for either Bush 2004 or McCain 2008, the 48 Democratic seats that went for Bush and McCain, the 54 seats that were in Republican hands four years go, it is very clear that the party's vulnerability exceeds their margin of 40 seats.

In particular, Cook says, the remaining Southern Democrats who hold competitive seats are vulnerable:

I was interested in your comment, "There's no comparable regional partisan shift working against the Democrats right now."

Have you been in the South lately? The level of anti-Obama, anti-Democratic and anti-Congress venom is extraordinary, and with 59 Democrat-held seats in the region, 22 in or potentially in competitive districts, this is a very serious situation for Democrats. I have had several Democratic members from the region say the atmosphere is as bad or worse than it was in 1994.

This is not just about President Obama. It is anti-Congress and anti-Democratic Congress.

While the election is obviously 13 months away and much can change, that means it could get better, or snowball and get worse. To the extent that Democratic performance in 2008 was elevated by unusually high African-American turnout, that exposure to decline is even greater.

At this point, Democratic members in the South, Border South, Mountain states, in districts with heavy rural and small town populations as opposed to urban and suburban, particularly those with few transplants from other parts of the country, and fewer college graduates, are at particular exposure. Some of these members have either never had a tough race or haven't in many years, with campaign organizations that are hardly sharped to a fine edge.

So while the Democratic performance in the generic Congressional, which is substantially lower than it was during the periods leading up to the 2006 and 2008 elections, when these majorities were built, that is only part of the case for why this may be an extremely challenging election for Democrats.

How seriously should we take these objections? On the first point, Cook's job is to focus on the details of individual races, so it's not surprising that he thinks we should do so. But it's easy to be drawn into highly idiosyncratic narratives and end up losing sight of the big picture. In particular, individual House races are a noisy, lagging indicator of national trends (see, for instance, the House races that suddenly became competitive very late in 1994 and 2006). Political scientists try to abstract away from these details and analyze the underlying process that generates House election outcomes. Cook argues that many House seats held by Democrats are potentially vulnerable, but majority parties always hold marginal seats. The question is whether the number of potentially vulnerable Democratic members is significantly greater than, say, the number of vulnerable Republicans in 2006. (In technical terms, what does the seats-votes curve look like for 2010 relative to previous elections?)

In terms of Cook's second point about the South, I'm open to the idea that the regional shift against Democrats is not complete, making some members there particularly vulnerable. But with only 22 in competitive or potentially competitive races, it's not clear that enough Southern Democrats will lose to create a 1994-style landslide.

Update 10/5 9:20 AM: See my post comparing the GOP image across the last five midterm election cycles for more on the 1994 comparison. I also considered regional differences in a second post, which did not find large differences in GOP favorability between the South and other regions in 1993-1994 or 2009.

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

Will 2010 be like 1994?

During his interview with President Clinton yesterday on Meet the Press, David Gregory asked a question that is increasingly occupying the minds of prominent Democrats -- "do you worry about a repeat of '94 politically?"

Vice President Joe Biden raised a similar concern last week, telling attendees at a Democratic fundraiser in Delaware that “If [Republicans] take them back [35 Democratic House seats in traditionally Republican districts], this [is] the end of the road for what Barack and I are trying to do."

So is the House really in play? Analysis by several political scientists suggests that the answer is yes. Democrats could lose the House, which would take a 40 seat swing, but a 1994-style landslide seems unlikely.

A Sept. 3 column by Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, analyzes a statistical model of midterm elections since 1946 and concludes that Democrats should expect significant losses:

Democrats are likely to lose at least 15 seats in the House of Representatives in 2010 and their losses could go as high as 30-40 seats. The Senate looks more promising for Democrats because there are as many Republican as Democratic seats up for election next year but a loss of 3-4 seats is entirely possible.

Under what Abramowitz calls "what might be considered a worst case scenario for Democrats" in which "President Obama's approval rating sinks into the low 40s next year" and "Republicans take a 5 point lead on the generic ballot," he projects a GOP gain of four seats in the Senate and 41 seats in the House -- just enough to take back control of the lower chamber.

Tom Holbrook at UW-Milwaukee cautions, however, against Charlie Cook's warning that "wave elections, more often than not, start just like this: The president's ratings plummet; his party loses its advantage on the generic congressional ballot test; the intensity of opposition-party voters skyrockets; his own party's voters become complacent or even depressed; and independent voters move lopsidedly away":

Let's look first at presidential approval... [I]t appears that early reports of presidential approval are fair predictors of midterm losses (r=.60, p=.02), though there are still a number of data points that are significantly off the regression line... Still, there is a clear relationship here, one that might foreshadow the outcomes of next year's elections. Based on the Obama's current level of approval (52%, Gallup polls in September), the trend in these data predicts a seat loss of 28 seats for the Democrats in 2010.

Should this be cause for Republican jubilation and Democratic hand-wringing? Not quite. The problem with forecasts like this one is that the sample size is small enough (n=15) and the forecasting error is large enough (standard error of forecast=17.9) that a 95% confidence interval around the prediction ranges from a loss of 67 seats to a gain of 11 seats. In other words, the prediction from these data encompasses everything from a complete Democratic collapse to historic gains for the Democrats. The best guess is still substantial Democratic losses, but with plenty of hedging.

What about Obama's standing among independents? Is it particularly important to the Democratic fortunes in the 2010 elections? It turns out that presidential support among independents is no more or less important than the overall level of presidential approval...

Finally, we turn to the generic congressional ballot. It is clear from other research that the generic ballot predicts well in the fall of election years (see Abramowitz), but is it really of much use 14 months out? In a word, no...

The third political scientist to weigh in, Andrew Gelman at Columbia, suggests that the current generic Congressional ballot numbers for Democrats are roughly consistent with a Republican vote swing that would be large enough to take back the House (though he admits he's extrapolating -- see Holbrook's finding above).

Finally, low-volume trading on the Intrade prediction market puts the probability of a Republican takeover of the House at 37%.

In the end, Democrats seem likely to suffer significant losses (especially if the economy hasn't started to turn around), but Holbrook is right to emphasize the level of uncertainty, which is still relatively high. As to the 1994 question, here's what Clinton said to Gregory yesterday:

PRES. CLINTON: It, it--there's no way they can make it that bad, for several reasons. Number one, the country is more diverse and more interested in positive action. Number two, they've seen this movie before, because they had eight years under President Bush when the Republicans finally had the whole government, and they know the results were bad. And number three, the Democrats haven't taken on the gun lobby like I did, and they took 15 out of our members out. So I don't think it'll be--whatever happens, it'll be manageable for the president.

I'd put a slightly different spin on the first and third points. From a political science perspective, 1994 was the culmination of the long decline of Democratic dominance among whites in the South -- many incumbents were vulnerable on issues like guns, gays in the military, etc. because their districts had changed. There's no comparable regional partisan shift working against the Democrats right now. Clinton's second point can be similarly reinterpreted -- the damage done to Republican brand under President Bush may restrict Republican gains in this election relative to 1994.

Update 9/28 11:52 AM: I missed a more recent Abramowitz analysis, which argues that a repeat of 1994 is unlikely due to the growing proportion of non-white voters in the electorate -- a development that is likely to damage the GOP's prospects due to its weakness with those groups (see Clinton's first point above).

Update 9/29 7:19 AM: The Hill points out another reason that a 1994-style wave election is unlikely - the lack of retirements by incumbents:

In the last three “wave elections,” the party that lost a large number of seats has been hampered by incumbents not running for reelection. But so far in the 2010 cycle, not a single House member has announced his or her retirement, though 18 — seven Democrats and 11 Republicans — have said they will run for higher office.

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

Obama didn't "appease" Russia

Last week I criticized those conservatives who rushed to describe President Obama's decision to withdraw a missile defense system from Eastern Europe as "appeasement." The comparison to the appeasement of Hitler was simply absurd on its face. And, as I pointed out in a comment, the rationale for the move was unknown -- how could conservatives even know if it was intended as appeasement?

Today, however, the picture has started to come into focus. The New York Times reports that Obama's decision was part of a quid pro quo in which Russia agreed to support tougher sanctions against Iran:

President Obama, in his first visit to the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, made progress Wednesday on two key issues, wringing a concession from Russia to consider tough new sanctions against Iran and securing support from Moscow and Beijing for a Security Council resolution to curb nuclear weapons.

The successes came as Mr. Obama told leaders that the United States intended to begin a new era of engagement with the world, in a sweeping address to the General Assembly in which he sought to clearly delineate differences between himself and the administration of President George W. Bush.

One of the fruits of those differences — although White House officials were loath to acknowledge any quid pro quo publicly — emerged during Mr. Obama’s meeting on Wednesday afternoon with President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia, the first between the two since Mr. Obama decided to replace Mr. Bush’s missile defense program in Eastern Europe with a version less threatening to Moscow.

With a beaming Mr. Obama standing next to him, Mr. Medvedev signaled for the first time that Russia would be amenable to longstanding American requests to toughen sanctions against Iran significantly if, as expected, nuclear talks scheduled for next month failed to make progress.

“I told His Excellency Mr. President that we believe we need to help Iran to take a right decision,” Mr. Medvedev said, adding that “sanctions rarely lead to productive results, but in some cases, sanctions are inevitable.”

White House officials could barely hide their glee. “I couldn’t have said it any better myself,” a delighted Michael McFaul, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser for democracy and Russia, told reporters after the meeting. He insisted nonetheless that the administration had not tried to buy Russia’s cooperation with its decision to scrap the missile shield in Europe in favor of a reconfigured system.

Privately, several administration officials did acknowledge that missile defense might have had something to do with Moscow’s newfound verbal cooperation on the Iran sanctions issue.

I hope we can all agree that there's a categorical difference between this sort of routine great powers diplomacy and giving land to Hitler so that he won't invade other countries.

PPP national "birther"/"truther" poll

[Update (6/30/10): Serious questions have been raised about the validity of Research 2000's polls. The results discussed below should thus be viewed as potentially suspect until the matter is resolved.]

Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling continues his interesting polling on political misperceptions in a new national poll (PDF) that was conducted Sept. 18-21 and released today.

As in the New Jersey poll released last week, PPP's national poll includes contrasting "truther" and "birther" questions. However, Jensen consulted with me on the wording of the "truther" question, which I had criticized, and ended up selecting new wording I adapted from a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll. The new question removes the ambiguity associated with the phrase "advance knowledge," which could be interpreted to refer to the August 2001 memo Bush received warning of the threat from Al Qaeda:

Old question: "Do you think George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks?"

New question: "Do you think President Bush intentionally allowed the 9/11 attacks to take place because he wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?"

Here are the poll results for the two misperceptions by party:

The primary finding is that the Obama birth certificate misperception has become far more prevalent among Republicans (42% no, 22% not sure) than the 9/11 misperception for Democrats (25% yes, 12% not sure). The percentage of Republicans who directly endorse the myth has increased substantially since the Daily Kos poll released in late July (which found 28% of Republicans said Obama wasn't born in this country and 30% weren't sure).

In terms of the 9/11 myth, the PPP results are generally consistent with what Scripps found in 2006, though reported levels of 9/11 misperceptions are lower among Democrats* (note: the Scripps results are juxtaposed below with the Daily Kos poll results referenced above):

The difference in 9/11 misperceptions between the two polls could be the result of variations in question wording (among other things, the original Scripps question refers to "people in the federal government" rather than President Bush) or differences in the response options (yes/no versus a scale of likelihood). 9/11 misperceptions may also have declined over time, particularly since Bush is no longer in office.

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

Romney's 2012 positioning on TARP

Matthew Yglesias calls it "striking" that Mitt Romney and so many other conservatives are engaging in opportunistic position-taking against TARP:

Dave Weigel points out that Mitt Romney is now slamming the TARP bill that he once favored. Shocking to see that guy change his position on something.

But Romney aside, it’s striking to see the number of conservatives who’ve decided that an initiative proposed by George W. Bush and Hank Paulson and endorsed by the GOP congressional leadership was and is secretly some socialist plot. Similarly with the idea that Ben Bernanke, former Bush administration official, is running some sort of rogue left-wing operation at the Fed. Obviously the economy’s still in a bad position today, but the evidence really does indicate that the whole suite of recovery measures (stimulus, TARP, Fed programs) are having the desired effect and things are turning around. I think this strategy of opportunistically pretending to have opposed this stuff could really come around to bite the right in the butt if things are looking better in 12 months and I think it’s very likely that things will be looking better in 12 months.

While it's true that "opportunistically pretending to have opposed this stuff could really come around to bite the right in the butt if things are looking better in 12 months," that's a rational calculation that politicians often make. If TARP and the stimulus work and the economy is in great shape in 2012, it's extremely likely that President Obama will be re-elected regardless of what Romney does. So he has every incentive to put his chips down on the side of predicting TARP's failure, which could help position him to defeat Obama in 2012 if the economy is doing poorly. The same reasoning applies for the GOP more generally in 2010 and 2012.

Alterman: No birther/truther parallel

In an online column last week, Eric Alterman and co-author Mickey Ehrlich denied any parallel in levels of partisan support for the "birther" and "truther" misperceptions:

David Paul Kuhn at Time.com attempted evenhandedness by introducing the results of supposed “truther” polls conducted in 2007. His claim is that the same number of Democrats believed that Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance as Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen. However, this comparison doesn’t work. While Bush was handed a memo explaining that Osama bin Laden was determined to attack in the continental United States and decided to go fishing that day, no evidence exists anywhere to dispute Obama’s citizenship.

However, the parallel isn't based simply on one potentially ambiguous poll question (a Rasmussen poll asking "Did Bush know about the 9/11 attacks in advance?"). As I showed back in August, Democratic support for the proposition that "People in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East" in 2006 was quite comparable to birther misperceptions among Republicans in recent polls. What's bizarre is that the Kuhn post linked by Alterman and Ehrlich cites me making precisely this point. Did they even read it?

"Appeasement" overuse redux

Back in 2006, I proposed the following corollary to Godwin's law in a column for Time.com:

A well-known rule of Internet discourse is Godwin's law, which states that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability.

Let me propose Nyhan's corollary: As a foreign policy debate with conservatives grows longer, the probability of a comparison with the appeasement of Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability.

As Sam Roggeveen notes, my prediction came true yesterday. Within hours of President Obama's decision to cancel an antiballistic missile system in Eastern Europe, the Hudson's Institute Seth Cropsey was already driving the talking point into the ground in a Weekly Standard article:

Obama's Appeasement
The likely harm that results from the administration's surrender on missile defense goes far beyond Europe.

The Obama administration chose an historic month to appease the Russians by reneging on the U.S. proposal to place ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic. September 1st of 2009 was the 70th anniversary of the Nazis' unprovoked attack on Poland. In the middle of the same month the Red Army invaded Poland--70 years ago to the day. At the end of this month is the 71st anniversary of the Munich agreement in which England and France agreed to allow Hitler to annex large portions of western Czechoslovakia...

Obama's appeasement of the Russians in the same two countries is an eerie recapitulation of Western weakness...

As with Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, appeasing the Russians is not likely to produce any positive results...

This decision is the clearest and most definitive evidence yet that what the Obama administration means by a "reset" of our relations with Russia is simple appeasement...

In Central Europe the decision is a pointed reminder that U.S. policy has thrown the Central Europeans under the Russian bus once since the end of World War II...

This capitulation is all the more inexcusable because, unlike the situation that Chamberlain faced at Munich in 1938, Russia, unlike Nazi Germany, is still a relatively weak power. The Obama administration has as little to fear from Russia's military as it has to expect that Russian goodwill or self-interest will have a moderating effect on Iran's plans to become a nuclear power.

This sort of argument by analogy is a substitute for rational thought. (Who cares if it's almost the 71st anniversary of Munich?) People may disagree about the merits of Obama's decision, but it's absurd to say that it's comparable to the appeasement of Hitler.

Update 9/18 2:19 PM: Mike Pence gets in on the action:

Republican Congressman Mike Pence (IN) harkened to the days of the Cold War and warned the administration against bowing to a burgeoning powerhouse, Russia, "The Obama administration is continuing a policy of appeasement at the expense of our allies. History teaches that weakness and appeasement invite aggression against peaceful nations."

Update 9/18 3:02 PM: And here's Roy Blunt:

One Republican, Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, went as far as to accuse Obama of appeasement, noting that yesterday marked the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland. “Appeasement of dangerous nations does not inspire peace,’’ Blunt said in a statement.

9/11 and birther misperceptions in NJ

Back in August, I created this plot showing the parallels in partisan misperceptions about President Bush (a 9/11 conspiracy) and President Obama (not a citizen):

Public Policy Polling just asked questions about both misperceptions in the same poll in New Jersey (PDF). While the 9/11 question, which asks whether the respondent thinks Bush had "advance knowledge" of the attacks, isn't ideal for reasons outlined in the previous post, the results are extremely similar to those presented above (though the partisan skew of the misperceptions among independents flips):

The poll also asked if people think Obama is the anti-Christ (GOP: 14% yes, 15% not sure). It's too bad they didn't also ask about whether Bush is the anti-Christ or we could have had another nice comparison...

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

Dukakis's "no comment" rationale

Via Taegan Goddard, Michael Dukakis confuses reporters with this classic rationale for not commenting on a possible Senate appointment:

“I’m not commenting,” he said. “Why not? 'Cause I don’t want to comment.”

It's either a PR masterstroke (you answer the question while saying nothing), or a statement of his belief in free will.

The spread of the two million protestor myth

Chris Orr beat me to the metaphor, but has there ever been a more absurd game of political Telephone than the way the two million protestors myth was created and propagated online?

Eric Boehlert of Media Matters documents the carnage:

The conservative comedy of errors began on Saturday when Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, took to the rally stage and unfurled a massive lie. He told the crowd ABC News had reported that between 1 million to 1.5 million people had gathered to protest Obama's policies. (Later, a FreedomWorks flack conceded she had no idea know why Kibbe manufactured the claim about ABC News.)

Immediately, conservative activist Tabitha Hale (aka "pinkelephantpun") tweeted Kibbe's lie but added an additional 500,000 people to the tally: "ABC reporting 2 million people."

Seven minutes later, Malkin re-tweeted Hale's claim. Then, one minute after that, Malkin turned that tweet into part of her ongoing protest coverage. Intrepid "reporter" Malkin took an unsupported tweet and reported it as news:

12:34pm Eastern: Police estimate 1.2 million in attendance. ABC News reporting crowd at 2 million -- tweets Tabitha Hale from D.C.

Teeny, tiny fringe, huh?

Note that in her blog post there were no links for Malkin's utterly fantastic claim, no place on the Web where readers could go and confirm that D.C. police had pegged the crowd at 1.2 million or that ABC had made the staggering claim of 2 million. The lack of live links should have been a massive red flag for readers and fellow bloggers, especially when it was associated with such a controversial and news-breaking claim.

But, of course, Malkin had no links or any real facts to go on. All she had was a couple of tweets from Hale, who, in retrospect, appeared to have spent much of Saturday just making shit up.

But again, none of that mattered, because Malkin had spoken (2 million!) and the right-wing bloggers knew what to do. Let's take a stroll through the far-right blogosphere and see which sites did their best to spread Malkin's patently absurd claim about 2 million protesters. [Emphasis added.]

Pajamas Media's Roger Simon:

I can remember telling Glenn Reynolds during CPAC that these Tea Party demonstrations were rinky-dink and going nowhere. Barely more than a half-year later, they're putting two million people on the Washington Mall. Wow!

Jawa Report:

UPDATE:(Newbie): Crowd estimated by ABC NEWS: 2 MILLION!

Looking at the Left:

ABC News reports that two million Americans flooded D.C. in what people in the crowd were calling "a conservative Woodstock" Like the liberal Woodstock of the '60s, thousands were rumored stranded on freeways.

Atlas Shrugs:

The two photos above show a tiny fraction of the two million ABC estimates attended.

NewsBusters, the day after the 2 million people story had been debunked:

You'll note no mention of the D.C. rally yesterday that drew an estimated 1-2 million people.

Wizbang:

Michelle Malkin reported on her site that ABC News estimated the crowd to be 2 million people.

[...]

Rick at Brutally Honest linked to this awesome time lapse video showing progression of the approximately 2 million people who marched in DC today:

Riehl World View:

ABC Reports 2 Million At DC Rally

Right Pundits:

Michelle Malkin is reporting that estimated turnout is now 2 million people.

And then there was the sad, confused work of blogger Stephen Green. Doing his best to spread the word about the supposedly massive crowd size on Saturday, Green first claimed that CNN had reported the crowd was 2 million strong. (CNN never did any such thing.) Then later under a banner that read "correction," Green, following Malkin's phony lead, reported it was ABC News that reported 2 million protesters were on hand. (Green then failed to correct his "correction.")

Of course, the 2 million tally never made sense. Not only couldn't anybody find ABC's alleged reporting, but no other news organization (not even rally co-sponsor Fox News) were going anywhere near the 2 million mark. Instead, most of Saturday's reports used phrases like "tens of thousands" to describe the crowd size.

Just after 4 p.m. Saturday, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen tweeted the glaring discrepancy:

http://michellemalkin.com/: "ABC News reporting crowd at 2 million." Front page, ABCNews.com: "thousands march on Capitol"  

By the end of that 4 o'clock hour, ABC's News' Yunji de Nies also weighed in:

Later that afternoon, ABC News took the unusual step of reporting an article about itself. Headlined "ABC News Was Misquoted on Crowd Size," the dispatch, designed solely to knock down the false rumor that Malkin helped hype, was quite emphatic:

At no time did ABC News, or its affiliates, report a number anywhere near as large. ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. In its reports, ABC News Radio described the crowd as "tens of thousands."

Finally, near day's end, Malkin finally addressed her bogus ABC News claim and pointed the finger of blame at FreedomWorks' Kibbe. (He's the one who first mentioned ABC News.) Malkin then thanked ABC News for "clearing this up," without noting that "this" was launched when Malkin broadcast a completely fictitious claim without the slightest hint of attribution and then waited most of the day to acknowledge her colossal blunder. And note that Malkin blamed Kibbe because Kibbe told the rally that ABC News had estimated the crowd to be between 1 million and 1.5 million. But Malkin told the world ABC News had claimed it was 2 million. So how was that Kibbe's fault?

Post-protest, some conservatives, such as Instapundit, still tried to push the phony 2 million claim by clinging to a typically awful and unsubstantiated article from the British press that originally suggested "up to two million people" marched on Washington. The article, though, lacked any sourcing. It was just another case of the British press regurgitating a right-wing lie. (The article was later changed to include an equally misleading claim: "As many as one million people flooded into Washington for a massive rally.")

By Saturday night, RedState blogger Erick Erickson, conceding the 2 million number was pure fantasy, did his best to clear up the confusion:

I've been talking all night to people who are there and involved. The 2 million number was generated by the media, but truly seems to be a gross inflation of what is there.

And with that we traveled full circle in the unstable world of the right-wing blogosphere. According to press-hating Erickson, it was the media that concocted the wildly inflated 2 million number. (ABC News again?) In the new, sanitized telling, Malkin's dirty hands, of course, had been completely washed and her leading role in the embarrassing charade had been forgotten and forgiven. Because at the end of the day, it was the media's fault all along.

Amazingly, as Boehlert later pointed out, the Los Angeles Times then framed the story as a "he said," "she said" debate in its headline and subhed:

Crowd estimates vary wildly for Capitol march
How many angry conservatives showed up to protest Obama's policies? Was it 2 million? Or 60,000? It all depends on whom you ask.

In the lede, the LAT noted crowd "estimates ranging from 60,000 to 2 million" before finally clarifying in the fourth paragraph that the actual turnout was under 100,000 people.

But that's not all! As Ben Dimiero pointed out on Media Matters, a new meme later circulated in which a quote was attributed to a National Park Service spokesperson saying the rally was the largest Washington march ever. The problem is that he was talking about the Obama inauguration:

Yesterday on his radio program, while discussing the crowds at this weekend's 9/12 protests, Glenn Beck claimed that the LondonTelegraph "quote[d] a source from the Park Service, the National Park Service, saying that it is the largest march on Washington ever."  This led to a good deal of confusion here, as the Telegraph article contains no such quote.  Just another case of Beck making things up?  Actually, the story behind this turns out to be much funnier than we could have anticipated. 

Several conservative blogs have been quoting National Park Service spokesman "Dan Bana" as saying the 9/12 protest was "the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever."  This appears to be a repurposing of this quote from David Barna (who, unlike Dan Bana, appears to be a real person):

David Barna, a Park Service spokesman, said the agency did not conduct its own count. Instead, it will use a Washington Post account that said 1.8 million people gathered on the US Capitol grounds, National Mall, and parade route.

"It is a record," Barna said. "We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever."

Very impressive!  Unfortunately, as Little Green Footballs pointed out, that quote was actually about the inauguration:

This is so pathetic I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Dozens - if not hundreds - of right wing blogs are running with this quote, portraying it as a statement about the tea party held last weekend: 'We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever.'

The quote is from January. The National Park Service spokesman was talking about Barack Obama's inauguration.

When people said the Internet would revolutionize democracy, I don't think this is what they had in mind.

Update 9/16 2:22 PM: Broken links fixed (sorry about that).

Update 9/17 6:37 AM: Per David Smith's comment below, Glenn Reynolds was more skeptical of the two million figure than Boehlert's language suggests. He previously called it "improbably high" and wrote of the Daily Mail headline "So maybe I was wrong to be so skeptical. But cut it in half and it’s still a huge number."

Jon Chait on vacuous Senate moderates

Jon Chait follows up on his brilliant TNR column on the vacuousness of Senate moderates with a blog post in which he impersonates a moderate trying to avoid taking a position on where to go to dinner:

My wife: Do you want to go out to dinner?

Me: I don’t think there’s enough of a consensus on a restaurant.

Her: Well, why don’t you suggest a place you’d like to go?

Me: We’d just go to a Japanese restaurant, and I hate Japanese.

The underlying problem is that most politicians in the contemporary era enter politics at least in part because they have strong views on public policy. That seems to be less true of moderates, who therefore tend to allow themselves to be dragged along by the prevailing political tides, which they cautiously navigate with an eye toward reelection* and avoiding primary challenges. In principle, moderates can take tough stands and make bold votes, but it's rarely observed in practice.

* In fairness, moderates often have more competitive seats, but longtime incumbents like Olympia Snowe are basically safe and still take almost no political risks.

Deborah Solomon is harsh, part 5

As I've noted before, Deborah Solomon, who does the "Questions for..." feature in the New York Times Magazine, is an incredibly harsh interviewer (sample question: "You strike me as deeply unanalyzed. Have you ever considered seeing a psychiatrist?"). But as a friend notes, her interview with "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane is especially nasty:

SOLOMON: [T]he show might seem to mock family values by presenting the Griffins as a self-absorbed, unattractive clan. Are you contemptuous of families?

MACFARLANE: No. I’m very much on the fence.

SOLOMON: Which fence is that?

MACFARLANE: There are things about the single lifestyle that are very appealing.

SOLOMON: Are you straight?

MACFARLANE: Yep. I don’t have a steady gal.

SOLOMON: Why is that?

MACFARLANE: Oh, boy, we’re getting deep.

"Are you contemptuous of families?" is one of the great "When did you stop beating your wife?" questions of all time. There's no way to answer that, let alone a question about why someone is single.

The underlying problem is that Solomon's interviews are heavily condensed and edited, which gives her immense power to portray her subjects in whatever fashion she likes. It also allows her, as in the MacFarlane interview, to feature her own voice at the expense of the subject -- the published version of the MacFarlane interview includes more of her words than his. As a result, she gets off her zingers but we learn very little about the subject whose character is supposedly being revealed.

Interpreting "Who do you trust" polls

Though the public is closely divided on health care reform, Matthew Yglesias suggests an alternative interpretation in which "Obama is clearly winning" on the issue because of the zero sum nature of partisan politics. As evidence, he cites the public's preference for Democrats on the "Who do you trust to do a better job handling health care?" question in the latest Washington Post poll (48% Democrats, 36% Republicans).

However, it's not clear that the issue is zero sum. While a plurality of the public may prefer the Democratic approach to health care reform to the Republican approach (i.e. D > R), many of those same people may prefer the status quo to both parties' approaches (i.e. SQ > D > R). As a result, the Democratic pursuit of health care reform may hurt them more than Republicans, who are unlikely to have the power to pass legislation any time soon.

Update 9/14 4:41 PM: To clarify, the question is whether saying you trust Republicans to handle health care can be interpreted as a preference for the status quo over the Democratic proposals and nothing more. My argument is that saying you trust Republicans to "handle" health care may instead be interpreted as indicating a preference for the GOP's private market approach to reform (i.e. John McCain's plan). If a large number of people interpret the question this way and don't like the private market approach, the Democatic approach could look artificially popular. Individual-level poll data would help us adjudicate between these two different stories.

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

NY Times omits Moore deceptions in doc story

A New York Times story today uses Michael Moore's new documentary "Capitalism: A Love Story" as a news peg for a discussion of new report on ethical issues in documentary filmmaking:

At an early screening for the media and the film industry on this opening weekend of the Toronto International Film Festival, a packed house of more than 500 was mostly quiet as it watched Mr. Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” open with rousing scenes of an armed robbery, which played over a punked-up version of “Louie, Louie.”

What followed was a kaleidoscopic history of forced evictions, political corruption and Wall Street malfeasance — the sort of stuff that has made Mr. Moore one of the most commercially successful documentary filmmakers in history...

But a panel discussion on Sunday afternoon had a message for those who look to documentary films for guidance about matters as serious as business, politics and the meaning of life: let the viewer beware.

The discussion centered on a new report from the Center for Social Media at American University, titled “Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work.”

Based on anonymous interviews with 45 long-form documentary filmmakers, the study came to some conclusions that could shock those schooled in conventional journalistic ethics...

The report found that documentarians, while they generally aspire to act honorably, often operate under ad hoc ethical codes. The craft tends to see itself as being bound less by the need to be accurate and fair than by a desire for social justice, to level the playing field between those who are perceived to be powerful and those who are not.

That often means manipulating “individual facts, sequences and meanings of images,” said the report, if that might help viewers to grasp the documentary’s “higher truth.” Deception in pursuit of a good story is acceptable to some. A number said that corporate executives and celebrities were entitled to less protection as interview subjects than more sympathetic individuals.

However, the story fails to link these concerns back to Moore's work (as does the report). While media fact-checks of "Sicko" were often overstated, he has repeatedly manipulated "individual facts, sequences and meanings of images" in his previous work. For instance, Moore famously distorted the chronology of events in his first film "Roger and Me." In "Bowling for Columbine," Moore added a caption about Willie Horton to a Bush/Quayle ad in order to suggest that the campaign had engaged in race-baiting. He also portrayed Lockheed Martin rockets used to launch satellites as "weapons of mass destruction," staged a scene in which he picks up a gun at a bank, and distorted a speech given by National Rifle Association president Charlton Heston. ("Fahrenheit 9/11" does not include such blatant distortions, but it includes numerous half-truths and misleading insinuations.) This pattern is clearly relevant to the story, and yet it is omitted entirely.

Obama's health numbers: Not moving much

Last week, I predicted that President Obama's primetime speech to Congress would fail to have a significant effect on public opinion. While it's too early to reach a definitive conclusion, the early indications are largely consistent with that conclusion. An ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted Sept. 10-12 shows no statistically significant change in Obama's approval on health care or support for health care reform compared with a poll conducted August 10-12 (see also the Post story on the poll -- via Kaus). At best, Obama might have regained the ground he lost in late August -- a CBS News poll (PDF) conducted Sept. 10 showed a 12 point increase in approval of the president on health care compared with a poll conducted August 27-31, but that poll also showed no change in the percentage of Americans who think health care reform would help them personally. (In addition, the CBS poll re-surveyed respondents from the August 27-31 poll -- a format that is useful for comparing opinions before and after the speech, but may not be fully representative.)

Update 9/16 8:36 PM: Nate Silver calls me and George Stephanopolous out, falsely stating that both of us "[concluded] that there is no bounce on the basis of the ABC poll... while ignoring the other polling." That's wrong on two counts. First, at the time I posted, I had not seen any post-speech polls other than the ones cited in the post. Second, I didn't say "there is no bounce" -- I said the speech would most likely "fail to have a significant effect on public opinion" and that, "While it's too early to reach a definitive conclusion, the early indications are largely consistent with that conclusion." (Note also the post title: "Obama's health numbers: Not moving much" [emphasis added].)

Since I wrote that post, Rasmussen and CNN have released polls showing what Mark Blumenthal describes as "[s]mall, nominal increases in approval for Obama or support for health reform." In particular, the observed increases in support for health reform in the two polls were not statistically significant (Rasmussen's has seemingly dissipated already). Despite preliminary evidence of a small uptick in Obama's approval, I'll stand by my claim.

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

Crowdsourcing and the next Netflix Prize

An interesting development on the polling front: Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling is open-sourcing his polls. Yesterday he asked for suggestions on which state to poll next and posted a draft questionnaire for Joe Wilson's district for comment.

This approach, which I think is brilliant, raises a more general question: where's the innovation in content creation among political organizations? Beyond MoveOn.org, very few organizations in politics take advantage of the creativity and intelligence of their supporters.

Along similar lines, why doesn't a political organization like one of the major parties offer up some money in a competition to, say, predict who will respond favorably to solicitations for money, votes, etc. using anonymized data? The Netflix Prize, which will be awarded on the 21st, drew a vast amount of effort from the machine learning community, and there's now a company that will provide infrastructure for similar contests. Who's going to be the innovator?

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

"You lie!" in comparative perspective

Like Matthew Yglesias, I'm more upset about Rep. Joe Wilson's "You lie!" statement being false potentially misleading than about presidential heckling per se. And while Wilson's outburst was relatively unusual in recent history, it's important to remember that standards of political civility have changed. Consider, for instance, the famous caning of Senator Charles Sumner by Rep. Preston Brooks:

Other countries, too, have more confrontational politics in their legislative chambers:

In comparison, a little heckling is no big deal.

Update 9/10 11:55 AM: Per Rob's comment below, I should clarify my description of Wilson's statement as false above. Here's what Obama said:

There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false – the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.

The interpretation of Obama's statement -- and Wilson's response -- depends on how you define "insure" and "reforms." Obama is clearly referring to the the false claim that health care reform would provide free health insurance to illegal immigrants. Many people may interpret Wilson's outburst as a defense of this claim (it's impossible to know what he was thinking). However, as Rob correctly points out, Obama's reforms would apply to everyone -- including illegal immigrants -- who purchases coverage through health insurance exchanges, including from a proposed government insurance program known as the public option. If you define the public option as insuring someone and describe it as a reform, then Obama's statement could be seen as misleading and Wilson's point could be seen as more supportable.

As such, I've revised the statement above to describe Wilson's statement as potentially misleading rather than false.

Update 9/10 2:10 PM: Matthew Yglesias objects to the passage above:

Brendan Nyhan bends over backwards to construct an interpretation of the situation such that Rep Wilson is merely being highly misleading rather than telling an outright falsehood...

In other words, though the bills would prevent undocumented immigrants from receiving any taxpayer assistance in purchasing health insurance, the proposals on the table don’t do anything special to prevent an undocumented immigrant from buying health insurance with his own money. To characterize this as “insur[ing] illegal immigrants” strikes me as about on a par with claiming that Obama’s health care plans give ibuprofen to illegal immigrants. After all, nothing in the bill stops illegal immigrants from buying ibuprofen in a store! And the very same FDA regulations that assure citizens and legal residents and tourists of the safety of ibuprofen will also benefit illegal immigrants.

I think this is unfair. The government would run the public option, which would end up insuring some illegal immigrants. Obama's denial that "our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants" is therefore imprecise -- he means the proposed legislation would not subsidize the insurance costs of illegal immigrants. Yglesias and I know what Obama meant; others may not. Moreover, views differ over the extent to which the public option would end up being publicly subsidized in practice -- many people, including me, believe it would end up receiving significant direct or indirect subsidies. In other words, getting insurance from the public option may be more like buying ibuprofen in one of those subsidized tax-free stores on military bases. From this perspective, you can argue that illegal immigrants would receive some benefit.

As yet additional context, here's Wilson responding in a press interview in which he cites verification amendments introduced by Republicans in committee:

In this case, the argument is that the bill would also not take sufficient steps to verify the eligibility of applicants for insurance subsidies, leading to fraudulent claims. (Whether that's true or not is an empirical question that I can't answer.)

Update 9/11 7:36 AM: See also this followup from Politifact which provides more detail on the question of whether illegal immigrants could fraudulently obtain insurance subsidies.

Also, the online CBS News show Washington Unplugged has compiled an impressive highlight reel of political fights, including a lawmaker who uses a judo throw (!) about halfway through the clip (via Taegan Goddard):

Watch CBS Videos Online

Useless instant polls on Obama speech

Per Mark Blumenthal, all instant polls on reactions to Obama's speech are scientifically useless -- pay no attention to them. For instance, CNN touts its poll as showing a "Double-digit post-speech jump for Obama plan" but is forced to admit that "The audience for the speech appears to be more Democratic than the U.S. population as a whole." I continue to expect that the ultimate effect of the speech will be minimal.

Update 9/10 7:13 AM: Blumenthal notes that instant polls showed a similar reaction to the 2006 State of the Union, and that wasn't exactly a game-changer for the Bush administration.

Obama's speech unlikely to move polls

President Obama is going to address the nation tonight about health care. Despite all the hype, it's not likely to change much in terms of public opinion.

Over the last few years, I've frequently cited political science research showing that presidential speeches usually fail to change public opinion on domestic policy issues. From Bill Clinton's failed push for health care reform in 1993 to George W. Bush's ill-fated effort to add private accounts to Social Security in 2005, past administrations have repeatedly overestimated their ability to change public opinion. The reason is simple -- the president's message is typically offset by that of the opposition. In the aggregate, the effects tend to cancel out and the numbers don't move.

(John Sides has an especially nice post on this point at the Monkey Cage in which he debunks the claim that Clinton's approval surged after the 1993 speech.)

What's so striking is that reporters and politicos alike still don't understand this point. Why? One explanation is that people tend to conflate domestic policy with foreign policy, where the president has more freedom of action, the public has less information, and the opposition is often more deferential to the president (and is thus less likely to offset his message). In addition, some cases like the Reagan and Bush 43 tax cuts in which the president raised the salience of a relatively popular issue (but didn't change public opinion) are often misinterpreted. Finally, there's a tendency to explain away past failures via post hoc narratives of failed presidential leadership, bad communication strategy, etc. However, it's not likely that any kind of leadership or PR tactic can overcome an offsetting opposition message and change public opinion on a controversial domestic policy issue under normal political circumstances.

Update 9/9 4:39 PM: As I said above, politicians just don't understand -- Obama's own allies in the party are raising expectations to an unrealistic level:

[Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid said he thinks Obama's speech will clarify the debate.

"I have every belief that when he finishes his speech tomorrow, the American people will be able to put aside some of the ridiculous falsehoods that have been perpetrated these past few weeks," Reid, D-Nevada, said Tuesday.

A House Democrat said Obama's specifics could be a game-changer in answering Americans' anger and concern over health care reform, displayed in sometimes violent and rowdy town halls over the summer.

"The president is clearly not running away from this battle but rather confronting the challenges we've encountered these last few weeks head-on," Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel of New York said. "He's pulling out all the stops, and this level of involvement from the president could well be a game-changer."

Rangel said the speech could be a great way to turn public opinion on health care around.

A recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll showed that Americans are evenly split over whether to support or oppose Obama's health care plan.

Six in 10 younger Americans support the plan; six in 10 senior citizens oppose it.

NYT inconsistency on "he said," "she said"

One of the most frustrating aspects of the fight against "he said," "she said" journalism is the inconsistency within news outlets about how they treat misleading or unsupported factual claims.

For instance, The New York Times just published another article directly identifying Betsy McCaughey as a proponent of health care misinformation (see also my post on the first Times piece). Note the laudable lack of hedging or artificial balance in this passage:

[McCaughey] incorrectly stated in July that a Democratic bill in the House would “absolutely require” counseling sessions for Medicare recipients “that will tell them how to end their life sooner,” drawing a “Pants on Fire” rating from the PolitiFact fact-checking Web site; her false assertion that the presidential health adviser Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel believed “medical care should be reserved for the nondisabled” helped inspire the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s discredited warning about “death panels’ ” deciding who is “worthy of health care.”

Two days later, however, the Times ran a story on national service programs that included this passage in which the absurd charges of Americorps critics are treated with kid gloves:

Critics say that these bipartisan programs [Americorps and other national service programs] provide little more than busywork for volunteers; some even see dark forces at play. Michelle Bachmann, a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, cautioned that they might morph into mandatory “re-education camps,” while the conservative commentator Glenn Beck recited the AmeriCorps pledge (“I will get things done for America,” it begins) on television while wearing lederhosen — to make either a strained analogy to National Socialism or a daring fashion statement.

Bachmann's claim is reported without comment, and the only substantive statement on Beck's comparison to the Nazis is a description of it as "a strained analogy." (Strained! The Nazis!) It's not clear why the reporter felt like the story had to be balanced by this nonsense (surely there are more serious critics of Americorps), but if they are to be included, the Times has some duty to assess the likelihood of the scenarios that Bachmann and Beck are envisioning.

At a more fundamental level, the media needs to draw the line and stop reporting on the paranoid fringe. Is the Times going to balance every news story on the Obama administration with a paragraph saying Bachmann and Beck say that the White House is leading us toward socialism, fascism, etc.? These are not serious people and their claims do not deserve coverage.