Brendan Nyhan

Today’s New York Times featured a chilling anecdote about the consequences of linking health insurance to employment:

ASHLAND, Ohio — As jobless numbers reach levels not seen in 25 years, another crisis is unfolding for millions of people who lost their health insurance along with their jobs, joining the ranks of the uninsured.

The crisis is on display here. Starla D. Darling, 27, was pregnant when she learned that her insurance coverage was about to end. She rushed to the hospital, took a medication to induce labor and then had an emergency Caesarean section, in the hope that her Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan would pay for the delivery.

I was honored to be interviewed yesterday by a journalist in Iraq who was writing a story about provincial elections in Iraq and the role of the media in political campaigns. He called me because of my work as a press critic, but it’s hard to be critical of the media when you’re talking to someone who is literally risking his life for the job. Pretty awe-inspiring stuff.

If you haven’t read it yet, this Michael Lewis piece on the financial meltdown is a storytelling classic matched only by the This American Life episode on the crisis.

If you want to understand what happened in the election, the best single place to start may be this transcript (PDF) of an all-star Brookings Institution panel featuring the eminent political scientists Larry Bartels, Gary Jacobson, and Jim Stimson along with Thomas Mann of Brookings and John Harwood of CNBC/New York Times — make sure to check it out.

Charles Homans of the Washington Monthly has my favorite Obama celebration anecdote so far (article not online):

We walked to the White House. It wasn’t far away, and it seemed like the thing to do. The crowd we met on 17th Street looked like they were in a nocturnal Fourth of July parade, but with no floats and a lot more drunk twenty-one-year-olds; by the time we reached 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the atmosphere had devolved into something like a goofy college party. “In Obama’s America there will be no pants!” one of the kids shouted toward the White House.

Change has come to America. Yes we can!

A conservative organization called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has released a new report which shows (yet again) that most Americans don’t have extensive factual knowledge of politics. (Whether this matters very much is a question that has been widely debated among political scientists.)

Based on this finding, the Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker embarassed herself and her newspaper by suggesting that “passive activities… diminish civic literacy” while “[a]ctively pursuing information… and participating in high-level conversations… makes one smarter”:

What’s behind the dumbing down of America?

The ISI found that passive activities, such as watching television (including TV news) and talking on the phone, diminish civic literacy.

Actively pursuing information through print media and participating in high-level conversations — even, potentially, blogging — makes one smarter.

But as anyone who has taken statistics 101 knows, correlation does not equal causation. The fact that people who score lower on the ISI quiz tend to watch TV and talk on the phone does not mean that those activities reduce their civic literacy. A more plausible explanation is that people who have low civic literacy scores also tend to watch more TV and talk on the phone more. (At a minimum, Parker and ISI can’t distinguish between these two possibilities with cross-sectional survey data.)

How did this passage make it into the newspaper? Does anyone at the Post know anything about statistics?

Memo to journalists — as Kevin Drum points out, the cost of the various financial bailouts, loan guarantees, etc. are being wildly inflated in press reports:

This stuff has gotten completely out of hand, with “estimates” of the bailout these days ranging from $3 trillion to $7 trillion even though the vast bulk of this sum comes in the form of loan guarantees, lending facilities, and capital injections. The government will almost certainly end up spending a lot of money rescuing the financial system (I wouldn’t be surprised if the final tab comes to $1 trillion over five years, maybe $2 trillion at the outside), but it’s not $7 trillion or anything close to it. People really need to stop throwing around these numbers as if the bailout is comparable to World War II or something. That’s not reality based, folks.

Josh Marshall made a similar point:

We’ve heard a number of reports over recent days putting the total government bailout costs at several trillions of dollars. But there are a lot of apples and oranges being thrown around. There are directly appropriated US government spending on the TARP. Then there’s Fed lending, which is different. Then there are various loan guarantees and agreements to backstop questionable assets. These are all very different kinds of expenditures and some of them don’t even really count as ‘spending’ in the ordinary sense we understand the term. To start disentangling the mess, we’ve put together an initial run down of the many different kinds of spending, loans and loan-guarantees and what the amounts are with each.

This is one of those times when it would be really helpful to have a numerically literate press corps (see also the post above).

The White House has been caught making undisclosed changes to its website again (see the full report):

[H]istorians researching those early alliance-building efforts say they are troubled by what seem to be deletions of and alterations to the early official lists of nations that supported the war effort. The lists were posted on the White House Web site.

While administration officials acknowledged that the number of nations supporting the war changed over time, academic researchers say three official lists appear to have been changed, yet retained their original release date, making them appear to be unaltered originals.

Two other White House lists appear to have been taken off the Web site, according to a study of the documents by Scott L. Althaus and Kalev H. Leetaru of the Cline Center for Democracy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Back in 2002, I caught the Office of Management and Budget pulling a similar stunt in a Spinsanity column published on Salon.com:

Mitch Daniels, the former political operative and pharmaceutical executive who now serves as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Bush White House, has quickly made himself and his agency notorious… [A]n incorrect claim by OMB about the cost of the Bush tax cut has simply been erased from history.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman have pointed out, a July 12 press release from OMB contained a major factual error.

… In the third bullet point of the press release, OMB attributed figures pertaining to the 2002 budget to the wrong surplus estimate, claiming that “the recession erased two-thirds of the projected ten-year surplus (FY2002-2011)” and that the tax cut “generated less than 15% of the change.”

The OMB’s data itself, however, shows that those figures are incorrect…

The administration is fully aware that the press release was incorrect…

Rather than issue a correction, however, OMB has shamelessly slipped an altered version of the release onto its Web site in place of the original. There is absolutely no indication that it has been changed — the offending bullet point is simply gone.

The error in the original release may have been inadvertent, but why can’t OMB just admit its mistake and openly correct the record?

After Paul Krugman picked up the story, OMB finally admitted its mistake and added a disclosure to the release noting that it had been edited. Apparently, however, the administration didn’t learn its lesson.

TNR’s Marin Cogan has definitively debunked the conservative fear-mongering about Democrats reinstating the Fairness Doctrine that I questioned last week:

Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and other friends have spent the past year screaming about the horrors of Barack Obama. And, while it’s true that they talked ad nauseam about socialism and the Weathermen and Jeremiah Wright, careful listeners would have noticed a recurring theme of anxiety: that Obama was going to use the newly acquired levers of government to destroy them. Specifically, conservative paranoia over the possible reinstatement of the “fairness doctrine,” a defunct policy requiring that broadcasters allow opposing points of view to be heard over the airwaves, has reached a fevered pitch. In September, George Will was warning his readers that, “[u]nless McCain is president, the government will reinstate the … ‘fairness doctrine.’” In October, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page chimed in, predicting that under the spooky-sounding “liberal supermajority,” the fairness doctrine was “likely to be reimposed,” with the goal being “to shut down talk radio and other voices of political opposition.” And, two weeks before the election, the New York Post blasted: “Dems Get Set to Muzzle the Right.”

On Election Day, conservatives found a new bogeyman in Senator Chuck Schumer, after Fox News host Bill Hemmer cornered him about the issue on the air. Schumer just smirked: “I think we should all try to be fair and balanced, don’t you?” Rush Limbaugh seized on Schumer’s comments as evidence that the Democrats would “do everything they can” to bring the doctrine back. Two days after the election, National Review’s Peter Kirsanow tried to rally the troops to preempt the return of the policy. “Waiting until Inauguration Day to get geared up is too late. By that time the Fairness Doctrine Express will be at full steam–wavering Democrats will be pressed to support the new Democratic president, weak-kneed Republicans will want to display comity, the mainstream media will not be saddened to see talk radio annihilated and much of the public will be too enraptured by Obama’s Camelot inauguration to notice or care.”

To figure out who was causing such agitation, I went searching for the proponents of the fairness doctrine. I looked at Obama’s position–and it turns out that he doesn’t want the policy reinstated. Then I called the array of Democratic congressmen who had been tagged by conservatives as doctrine proponents. But they all denied any intention to push for its reinstatement. As some of the world’s great egotists, it’s not surprising that Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly believe they would be the first political prisoners interned in an Obama administration. But, the more I searched for actual evidence of the doctrine’s return, the more I had to conclude that Schumer was just messing with their heads…

It’s no wonder, then, that conservatives fear the fairness doctrine’s return and busily document any favorable mention of the policy by Democrats. One of the most recent remarks that fueled the paranoia occurred in June, when John Gizzi, a reporter from the conservative magazine Human Events, asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if she would allow a vote on a bill called the Broadcaster Freedom Act, which was introduced last year by former talk-show host turned House member Mike Pence in an attempt to permanently outlaw the reinstatement of the policy. Pelosi said she wouldn’t, mentioning New York Representative Louise Slaughter as an active proponent of reinstating the fairness doctrine. But Slaughter, like many other media-reform advocates, has shifted focus away from the doctrine in recent years…

Conservatives also focus on the 2005 effort by Democratic Representative Maurice Hinchey of New York to introduce a bill that would have reinstated the doctrine. But that effort went nowhere….

Today, the doctrine has almost no support from media-reform advocates…

Responses from the offices of most of the Democrats who have been pegged as fairness-doctrine proponents–Schumer, Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, and others–have ranged from a firm denial that the issue is a priority at all to disbelief at finding themselves at the center of a manufactured controversy….

Meanwhile, the president-elect himself has said in no uncertain terms that he does “not support reimposing the fairness doctrine on broadcasters.” Republican paranoia is nothing more than that.

Apparently House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been watching “Jerry Maguire”:

Democratic leaders in Congress sidetracked legislation to bail out the auto industry Thursday and demanded the Big Three develop a plan assuring the money would make them economically viable. “Until they show us the plan, we cannot show them the money,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said at a hastily called news conference in the Capitol.

I’m not sure her delivery quite does justice to the original, though:

Which movie catchphrase Pelosi will parrot next?