Brendan Nyhan

New at CJR: The misguided backlash against Nate Silver

My new column at CJR challenges the recent wave of misguided attacks on Nate Silver, whose estimates for the presidential race are generally consistent with other forecasting models and betting/futures markets. Here's how it begins:

Who will win the presidential election next Tuesday? Until recently, the market for analysis of questions like these has been dominated by mainstream political reporters and commentators. Their style leans heavily on qualitative impressions and hazy narratives. But as the audience for quantitative analysis of politics has grown, the establishment analysts have become increasingly defensive about their status.

The most well-known quantitative analyst of politics is Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight blog now appears on the New York Times website. Even though his black box statistical models have not been publicly disclosed or scientifically validated, Silver’s analyses have acquired a talismanic quality among political junkies, particularly with nervous liberals who are reassured by his forecast of a likely Obama victory (current estimate: 72.9%).

Unfortunately, Silver has become the target of a vitriolic backlash from innumerate pundits whose market dominance is under threat as well as ill-informed conservative commentators who think Silver is somehow skewing the polls for partisan reasons.

Read the whole thing for more.

New at CJR: The misleading momentum narrative

I have a new column up at CJR exploring why reporters have been mistakenly reporting that Mitt Romney has "momentum" in the presidential race. Here's how it begins:

On Thursday night, Politico beat a retreat in the great momentum debate of 2012. The site’s Glenn Thrush and Jennifer Epstein opened a big state-of-the-campaign story with this—“In the past 10 days, Mitt Romney’s campaign has gone from Big Mo to Slow Mo”—and went on to note that “an increasing pile of polling data [is] pointing to a race that has stabilized since Barack Obama’s disastrous performance at the Oct. 3rd debate in Denver.” The “Slow Mo” take was a dramatic about-face from a story published three days earlier (not ten!), in which Thrush and his colleague Jonathan Martin contrasted “a surging Romney” with a president who “is currently on the ugly end of Big Mo.”

The new Politico story is also more accurate. The presidential race has been essentially static in the second half of October...

The notion that Romney still had “momentum” weeks after his early October gains in the polls has now been debunked by numerous commentators and academics. And while that pushback is increasingly reflected in campaign-trail accounts, it is worth taking a closer look at why coverage of Romney’s “momentum” went wrong and what it tells us about the weaknesses of campaign journalism.

For more, read the whole thing.

New at CJR: All good debate coverage is local?

My new CJR column contrasts the pathologies of national presidential debate coverage with the generally more substantive and informative coverage of two recent debates here in New Hampshire. Here's how it begins:

If you cover politics for a national publication, the story of the debates so far has been President Obama’s supposedly lackluster performance and Vice President Biden’s over-the-top facial expressions. But are outside-the-Beltway journalists so easily sidetracked into amateur theater criticism and body language analysis? Recent evidence from New Hampshire suggests the answer is no. Is there hope for citizens learning something from debate coverage after all?

Read the whole thing for more.

New at CJR: Enabling the jobs report conspiracy theory

I have a new column up at CJR assessing coverage of Friday's jobs report. Unfortunately, far too much coverage gave voice to the conspiracy theories that started circulating rather than ignoring or casting doubt on them. Here's how it begins:

Media ethics pop quiz: When conspiracy theories started circulating on Twitter claiming that Friday’s jobs report had been politically manipulated, what should reporters have done?

(a) Avoid covering a baseless and unsubstantiated charge and focus instead on the mainstream debate over the meaning and significance of the jobs report.

(b) Carefully cover the conspiracy theory as news, making clear that no credible evidence exists to support the claim.

(c) Write up “he said,” “she said” news reports that treat the conspiracy theory as a matter of partisan dispute.

One can make a reasonable case for either (a) or (b), but several outlets chose (c) instead, writing up the charges in a format that is likely to help spread the myth and encourage more like it in the future. With incentives like these, should we be surprised that politicians and commentators keep making false claims?

Read the whole thing for more.

Understanding the "Romney won big!" narrative

As promised, I watched the debate last night without looking at Twitter, reading live blogs, reading emails, etc. Here's what I saw:

Unspun view of the debate - sticking by my pre-debate take: these are skilled pols who didn't get here by accident.

I saw nothing that would change race dynamic. As in most aspects of presidential campaigns, candidates are mostly fighting to a tie.

At best, Romney may firm up some soft supporters or pick up wavering GOP leaners with a negative impression of him from Obama ads, 47% video, etc.

I'm fully willing to concede that Romney might have performed somewhat better than Obama on stylistic grounds (as instant polls of debate watchers found), but the gap between the candidates was, in my view, relatively narrow. The debate was extremely wonky and lacked the sort of personal attacks and zingers that could be endlessly replayed in news coverage.

What's striking is how the media has transformed the debate into some sort of landslide victory that some hyperventilating commentators think could cost him the election. (The reality: Debates rarely move the polls more than a few points.) Here's why the debate is being framed as such a decisive Romney victory:

1. Low expectations: Both the public and journalists expected Obama to win even though it was not at all clear that he is a better debater than Romney.

2. Need for drama: The Atlantic's Robert Wright correctly predicted a Romney comeback narrative based on the media's need for drama and guessed that a better-than-expected debate performance might be the mechanism.

3. Restoring equilibrium: The fundamentals predict a very tight race (albeit with wide uncertainty) and yet the combination of Obama's convention bounce and the 47% video have helped him open up a substantial lead. It's plausible that Romney was underperforming. Certainly many voters had heard about a caricature of Romney that was unlikely to appear on stage. In that context, an event like a debate is more likely to be interpreted favorably and to help improve his public support and coverage a bit.

What's most interesting to me, though, is the way that the Romney victory narrative is constructed. Here's a look at how it's done using postmortems by Glenn Thrush in Politico and Ron Fournier in National Journal as examples:

1. Nuance-reducing headline: Both stories use headlines that frame the debate as some sort of rout:

Thrush: "Not debatable: Obama stumbles"

Fournier: "Incumbent Debate Curse: Barack Obama Falls to Mitt Romney"

2. Narratives about causes: Thrush and Fournier both framed their stories around the assertion that Obama performed poorly because he wasn't used to be challenged:

Thrush: "Obama, who has spent most of the past four years speaking to hand-picked interviewers or lecturing audiences required to remain mostly mute while he spoke, struggled to shake off the rust."

Fournier: "The president looked peeved and flat as he carried a conversation, for the first time in four years, with somebody telling him he’s wrong."

Even if we grant that Romney "won," we of course have no idea why Obama didn't perform as well as some had hoped, but the narrative works better if there's an understandable reason why Obama "lost."

3. Adjectives! Coverage of debates frequently consists of pseudo-analysis of how the candidates look on stage. With the debate lacking the dramatic exchanges and memorable zingers that journalists love so much, both Thrush and Fournier leaned heavily on adjectives to support their assertion that Obama lost. To Thrush, Obama "seemed far less comfortable, almost grim at times" and "seemed tense and defensive at times, and professorial," while Fournier wrote that Obama "looked peeved and flat" and "looked bitter."

If Romney picks up a point or two and the narrative incentives push in the direction of an Obama "win" in the second debate, expect him to be more likely to be portrayed as "resurgent," "confident," "energetic," etc.

New at CJR: Breaking the pack journalism paradigm

I have a new CJR column up warning journalists about converging on simplistic debate narratives based on campaign spin. As a remedy, I offer a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that news outlets should send a reporter into isolation to write up the debate without access to any other spin. What would happen? Here's how it begins:

As tonight’s presidential debate approaches, the chattering classes are pondering whether it will change the dynamics of the campaign, which currently favor President Obama over Mitt Romney.

The odds are that it will not—most debates are non-events, at least in terms of electoral impact; political science research suggests that they rarely cause a significant change in the polls. To the extent that debates do matter for the horse race, however, the most important mechanism seems to be not the content of the debate itself but the interpretation adopted in subsequent media coverage. Given these stakes, it’s vital that journalists be wary about coalescing too readily on a common narrative—and that they be especially skeptical of post-debate spin.

For more, read the whole thing.