Brendan Nyhan

New at CJR: Beware Green Lantern thinking on guns

My new column at CJR warns the media to avoid Green Lantern-style thinking in covering and commenting on President Obama's response to the shootings in Newtown. Here's how it begins:

In a riff inspired by the blogger Matthew Yglesias a few years ago, I proposed what I called the Green Lantern theory of the presidency to describe people who attribute all policy failures and compromise to a lack of presidential will. (For the uninitiated, the Green Lantern Corps are comic book heroes whose abilities to wield a “power ring” depend on their willpower.)

These assumptions, which come up all the time in political coverage and commentary (and are often encouraged by presidential candidates, particularly before they take office), are now creeping in to reporting and debate on potential policy responses to the elementary school massacre in Newtown, CT.

Read the whole thing for more.

New at CJR: Addressing the asymmetry question

My new CJR column considers the argument that the pressure for partisan balance in factchecking made 2012 campaign coverage worse. Here's how it begins:

Factchecking made great strides during the 2012 campaign, but were those advances compromised by the pressure to maintain partisan balance?

Two respected Washington think tank scholars say yes. Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, who have recently argued that Republican extremism is to blame for many of the pathologies of Washington, told The Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin last week that journalistic factchecking of the 2012 campaign may have been counterproductive...

Read the whole thing for more.

New at CJR: The need for better “fiscal cliff” reporting

My new column at CJR contrasts the questionable value-add for horse race journalism with the "fiscal cliff" negotiations, where good insider reporting is desperately needed. Here's how it begins:

We’ve just finished an election in which quantitative analysis provided far more accurate predictions than pundits and reporters, who frequently offered claims and analysis that were not informed by high-quality poll averages or basic political science. As a result, traditional journalists are licking their wounds and trying to re-evaluate how they can add value to campaign coverage.

Almost as quickly, however, the media’s focus has shifted from the election to the negotiations between President Obama and Congressional Republicans over how to avoid the so-called “fiscal cliff”—a topic where polls and quantitative analysis have relatively little to offer. Reporters, by contrast, have a great deal to contribute—indeed, they are the best source of information we have on the terms of the debate between the parties and the structure of the dynamics within each caucus.

For more, read the whole thing.