Brendan Nyhan

My new column at CJR examines the excesses of coverage of Hillary Clinton’s first tweet and what it suggests about coverage of her potential 2016 presidential campaign – here’s how it begins:

After more than four years representing the US abroad as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton returned to the domestic political fray last Monday with a tweet from her new @HillaryClinton account. The former first lady, senator, and presidential candidate is one of the most prominent Americans in public life and the early favorite for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. As a result, her every move is considered newsworthy. The celebrity-style coverage she receives can be innocuous, albeit silly, in some cases (Hillary and Chelsea took a selfie!), but the frenzy over her first tweet and wild speculation about its meaning suggest that another Clinton run would exacerbate the political media’s tendencies to overhype trivia and construct flimsy personality-based narratives about politicians.

Read the whole thing for more.

I forgot to post my latest CJR column on how some journalists and media outlets seized on a single poll to make evidence-free assertions that recent scandals had hurt President Obama’s approval ratings. Here’s how it begins:

Get out your wizard hats! It’s starting to sound like campaign season again.

Just as political reporters wanted to tell evidence-free stories about Mitt Romney’s “momentum” back in October, many media members are now being swept up in the Obama administration scandal narrative and making claims about the president’s declining standing with the public that aren’t yet supported by the data.

For more, read the whole thing.

For those who are interested, here’s my interview with Brooke Gladstone about my scandal research for this weekend’s edition of On the Media (click to play):

My new CJR column describes the potential value of a new political science dataset to reporters, especially those at the state level. Here’s an excerpt:

The fact that many reporters dubbed [former Massachusetts senator Scott] Brown a conservative during his Senate run is not surprising given some of his positions and rhetoric. One of the challenges of state-level political reporting is the lack of easily accessible information on the voting records and ideological positions of lawmakers, which makes it harder for journalists to scrutinize the way candidates like Brown define themselves.

Now, however, that information is easier to come by. On Monday, Shor and McCarty made their state legislator ideological estimates for the 1993-2011 period publicly available for the first time, along with chamber-level estimates of state legislative polarization. These data are a valuable resource for statehouse journalists with numerous potential applications in both legislative and campaign reporting.

Read the whole thing for more.

In my column today, I examine the challenges facing reporters covering the week’s outbreak of scandal fever in Washington and note the need for more attention to facts. Here’s how it begins:

The dilemma for journalists this week: How should you cover a series of proto-scandals with seemingly little in common? As far as we know, internal Obama administration edits of talking points about the Benghazi attacks, Internal Revenue Service targeting of conservative groups for additional scrutiny, and the Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records aren’t part of some overarching political strategy; they don’t even involve the same administration officials. What links these events together, of course, is a new political reality: the administration is embattled by scandal for the first time since President Obama took office. Given the political circumstances, that pattern appears likely to continue.

So what should reporters do?

Read the rest to find out.

My column last week (which I forgot to post) focused on the risk that coverage of the Independent Payment Advisory Board will reinforce the “death panels” myth. Here’s how it began:

House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell released a letter on Thursday stating that they would not recommend individuals for appointment to the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), an obscure government panel created as part of the Affordable Care Act in an effort to reduce cost growth in Medicare.

Unfortunately, the board is best known as the current vehicle for the false claim that Obama’s health care plan would create “death panels,” which spread widely after Sarah Palin’s August 2009 Facebook post coining the term. As a result, journalists face a conundrum. The pervasiveness of the myth is part of the reason the partisan dispute over IPAB appointments is now newsworthy—but as I warned back in January, credulous coverage has the potential to reinforce the misperception.

Read the whole thing for more.

After a largely scandal-free first term, President Obama appears likely to spend a lot more time mired in the politics of scandal after last week’s Benghazi hearings and Friday’s revelation of alleged political targeting at the IRS.

My research suggests that the structural conditions are strongly favorable for a major media scandal to emerge. First, I found that new scandals are likely to emerge when the president is unpopular among opposition party identifiers. Obama’s approval ratings are quite low among Republicans (10-18% in recent Gallup surveys), which creates pressure on GOP leaders to pursue scandal allegations as well as audience demand for scandal coverage. Along those lines, John Boehner is reportedly “obsessed” with Benghazi and working closely with Darrell Issa, the House committee chair leading the investigation. You can expect even stronger pressure from the GOP base to pursue the IRS investigations given the explosive nature of the allegations and the way that they reinforce previous suspicions about Obama politicizing the federal government.

In addition, I found that media scandals are less likely to emerge as pressure from other news stories increases. Now that the Boston Marathon bombings have faded from the headlines, there are few major stories in the news, especially with gun control and immigration legislation stalled in Congress. The press is therefore likely to devote more resources and airtime/print to covering the IRS and Benghazi stories than they would in a more cluttered news environment.

Finally, Obama is in his second term, which is when scandals are most likely to take place. After several years with no scandals – the longest of any contemporary president – he had two briefly pop up in April of last year: the GSA and Secret Service scandals. But second terms are far more difficult, as this figure from the paper illustrates using predicted probabilities for a hypothetical president with representative covariate values:

Under favorable conditions like these, I argue, the mainstream media and the opposition party are more likely to engage in the “co-production” of a media scandal, which requires the participation of both parties. The opposition party can’t successfully create a media scandal without sustained critical coverage in the press (see: Fast and Furious) and the media can’t create a scandal without political cover from the opposition party (see: Democrats after 9/11). In this case, not only are Republicans up in arms about IRS and Benghazi, but the press is mobilizing as well – Politico already called the IRS case “[a] classic Washington scandal” and National Journal’s Ron Fournier suggested Obama’s credibility is in question. For the White House, things are likely to get worse before they get better.

Relevant research:
–Scandal Potential: How political context and news congestion affect the president’s vulnerability to media scandal

My new CJR column is about the disjunction between the fictional powers that journalists often expect the President to possess and the reality of the chief executive’s limited influence over Congress. Here’s how it begins:

In Hollywood and the accounts of many of the nation’s leading journalists, events in Washington revolve around the president, who is thought to have virtually unlimited powers to cajole, charm, threaten, or bribe legislators into enacting his agenda. Within this framework, the success or failure of the president’s legislative agenda is typically attributed to his tactics, not contextual factors like party support in Congress.

In reality, the idea that the President can force an uncooperative Congress to do his bidding has been falsified over and over again—not just during President Obama’s administration on issues like gun control, but during previous presidencies. Even Lyndon Baines Johnson, the prototypical presidential wheeler-dealer, became far less persuasive when the national political climate changed after the 1966 midterm elections (one aide commented that by the end LBJ “couldn’t get Mother’s Day through” Congress). And yet journalists and commentators still try to defend their misguided notions of presidential power, suggesting instead that, for instance, Obama is being held back by a lack of personal charm or a failure to twist enough arms in Congress.

For more, read the whole thing.

My new column for Columbia Journalism Review examines the incentives that helped produce the stream of media errors during last week’s coverage of the Boston marathon bombings. Here’s an excerpt:

Why did much of the media perform so poorly? Breaking news events have always been difficult and confusing to cover; errors are frequently made. However, the near-infinite size of the news hole that media outlets are now expected to try to fill online, on cable, and in social media, even when little new or accurate information is available, exacerbates the challenge and creates perverse incentives. With weak reputational and commercial penalties for inaccuracy—CNN’s audience reportedly tripled from the slow-news period of the week before—reporters rushed to fill the void with whatever information was available, however dubious.

Read the whole thing for more.

My new column at CJR is an interview with Politifact founder Bill Adair, who is leaving the site and the Tampa Bay Times (where he serves as White House bureau chief) for a position at Duke University. Here’s an excerpt:

BN: Now seems like a good time to look back at what you’ve accomplished at PolitiFact, which has become the most influential factchecker in the business, including winning a Pulitzer Prize. What are you most proud of about your work there? And what you think the next steps are for the factchecking movement in general and specifically for PolitiFact?

BA: I’m really proud of the way we were able to expand to the states. We have 10 state PolitiFact sites in key places such as Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Virginia, where reporters for our partner news organizations do Truth-O-Meter fact-checks.

Letting someone else use our prize-winning brand was a risk. But we applied lessons from the fast food industry (conduct lots of training, provide good manuals, and do quality control checks) —and it’s worked well. Last year, the factchecking by our partners at the Cleveland Plain Dealer was really important in the U.S. Senate race.

I think PolitiFact’s next step is to keep expanding. We want to find partners in the remaining states and see if we can expand internationally. We are partnering with a respected Australian journalist to launch PolitiFact Australia later this spring. If that goes well, we’ll consider other countries.

For more, read the whole thing.