Brendan Nyhan

From my new Upshot column:

Saturday’s huge earthquake in Nepal killed at least 5,000 people, injured more than 8,000, and affected millions more. Relief efforts are underway to aid the survivors.

The extent of American aid may be limited, however, by our collective attention span. In the days since the quake, the riots in Baltimore after a man died from injuries suffered while in police custody came to dominate the news cycle. Reporting on events there has pushed news about the earthquake off the front page and attracted extensive cable news coverage. What coverage remains of the aftermath has tended to focus on the fate of a small number of Western climbers on Mount Everest rather than the larger humanitarian crisis.

The events in Baltimore and Nepal are both important and deserve our attention. But foreign news generates far less interest from consumers than domestic events. As a result, a story about a disaster like Nepal’s is more easily pushed off the news agenda.

From my new Upshot column:

Fact-checks of politicians’ statements have become increasingly prominent in media coverage of American politics. With dedicated fact-checkers like PolitiFact and recurring features in newspapers like The New York Times and news agencies like The Associated Press, more journalists are trying to assess the accuracy of claims made by public figures than ever before.

The audience for fact-checking is growing as well — on some days during the 2012 presidential campaign, for instance, PolitiFact was getting a million page views a day.

But are people learning about politics from these fact-checks? Or are they just cheering for their side and seeking out reinforcement for what they already believe?

This column draws on new research with Jason Reifler on the long-term effects of fact-checking exposure that we summarized in a new American Press Institute report. Lucas Graves, Jason, and I also released an API report examining the growth of fact-checking within political journalism.

From my new Upshot column:

In a number of states, parents are allowed to opt out of legal requirements to have their children vaccinated before entering school by claiming a “personal belief” or “philosophical” exemption. These provisions have raised a great deal of concern since the Disneyland measles outbreak, including in California, where it began. Unfortunately, the blundering approach state legislators there have taken to the issue shows how direct attacks on exemptions can rally the anti-vaccine cause.

From my new Upshot column:

It may be called waffling, flip-flopping or evolving, but every four years new presidential candidates find themselves adjusting inconvenient positions that might hinder their bid for the nomination.

What’s striking, though, is how some candidates who make these changes are portrayed as inauthentic by party elites and primary voters, and others — like Scott Walker — aren’t.

From my new Upshot column:

Will the fight for the G.O.P. presidential nomination be Hillary Clinton’s secret weapon in the 2016 election? Not according to the best political science research.

It’s often thought that divisive primary fights damage presidential nominees in the general election. People close to Hillary Clinton endorsed this theory in a Politico article Tuesday, which reported that “a core element of Clinton’s plan was to get out of the way and let the dueling wings of the Republican Party savage each other.” In their view, Mrs. Clinton benefits from the Republicans’ “wild and messy primary contest,” which will result in “a bloodied GOP nominee.”

From my new Q&A at The Monkey Cage with Dan Hopkins:

DH: So it sounds like you want to bring actual practice more in line with the deductive ideal in which we test previously stated hypotheses, is that right? Can pre-registration solve these kinds of problems on its own?

BN: Actually, I’m skeptical that preregistration itself — which is starting to come into wider use in development economics as well as experimental political science and psychology — is a solution. As I argued in a white paper for the American Political Science Association Task Force on Public Engagement, it is still too easy for publication bias to creep in to decisions by authors to submit papers to journals as well as evaluations by reviewers and editors after results are known. We’ve seen this problem with clinical trials, where selective and inaccurate reporting persists even though preregistration is mandatory.

I think a better approach is to offer a publishing option in which journals would consider accepting some articles in principle before the results were known based on peer review of the design and analysis plan. Such an approach, which has been formalized by the Registered Reports movement (of which I am a part), would better align author and journal incentives with our goals as scientists.

From my new Upshot column:

Has the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account hurt her in the polls?

You might think so if you read a CNN article published Monday night, which reported that “unfavorable views of Hillary Clinton are on the rise” after disclosure of her use of the email account while serving as secretary of state. (The network’s televised coverage of the poll made similar claims.)

This framing suggests that her standing with the public has declined considerably. In fact, the new poll actually seems to be good news for Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner. CNN found that 53 percent of Americans have a favorable view of her, which is somewhat higher than in other recent polls, including those conducted before the controversy.

From my new Upshot column:

Although the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s email is unlikely to damage her chances to reach the White House, her use of a private account as secretary of state suggests a larger set of concerns about her management approach. How did her staff not warn her about the political and security risks? And why didn’t they protect her more effectively once those risks became clear?

According to New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, the imbroglio “revives the larger question of whether Clinton is capable of managing a competent campaign (and thus, in turn, a competent administration).” He cites as evidence the turmoil within Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign, which was widely seen as mismanaged.

But what’s striking about these failures is how different they are. The paradox of Mrs. Clinton’s leadership style is that she often seems to simultaneously have too many advisers and too few.

From my new Upshot column:

The report Monday that Hillary Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state raises a number of important questions about government transparency and access to public records.

Unsurprisingly, however, the conversation quickly veered from matters of policy into ominous speculation about the political consequences for Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic Party presidential front-runner, including hyperbolic suggestions that the emails could “shake up the 2016 race,” cause irreparable damage to her, cause her to lose the general election, or even help force her out of the race.

The actual public response to the controversy is likely to be a combination of apathy and partisanship.

From my new Upshot column:

When Rudolph Giuliani said that he does “not believe that the president loves America,” he became the latest in a long line of public figures to question the loyalty or allegiance of the country’s first nonwhite president. While these criticisms are ostensibly directed at Barack Obama’s worldview, as Mr. Giuliani later said, they appear to reflect — or exploit — the tendency to associate being American with being white.

Mr. Obama’s loyalty to the United States has been questioned in this way since he reached the national stage. Just as people wrongly doubted that the president was born here, many prominent figures in national politics have smeared him as disloyal, often by suggesting that he is on the side of Islamic extremists (which plays on the related myth that he is Muslim rather than Christian).