Brendan Nyhan

My new column at CJR looks at how factcheckers sometimes fail to select their targets and define their standards appropriately. Here’s how it begins:

Is there such a thing as too much factchecking? Factcheck.org described former President Bill Clinton’s speech to the Democratic convention Wednesday evening as a “fact-checker’s nightmare” in part because, “with few exceptions… his stats checked out.” Rather than concede that it had little material to work with, however, The Associated Press manufactured a “fact check” of Clinton that focused far too heavily on omitted context and possible counter-arguments to his opinions rather than untruths or errors—and even managed to work in a gratuitous Monica Lewinsky reference that invoked Clinton’s reputation for factual slipperiness.

Journalists have also struggled to define an appropriate standard for factchecking in the case of Rep. Paul Ryan, the GOP vice presidential nominee.

Read the whole thing for more.

My new column at CJR argues that the persistence of false claims in the presidential campaign doesn’t mean that the fact-checkers have failed. Here’s how it begins:

Can the media stop politicians from misleading the public?

That’s the question on the minds of many journalists and commentators after Paul Ryan’s speech last night at the Republican National Convention, which continued the Romney campaign’s pattern of disingenuous and misleading attacks on President Obama. While Obama and his allies have made many misleading claims of their own, the frequency and repetition of the Romney campaign’s claims has been particularly striking.

For more, read the whole thing.

In my new column at CJR, I defend the value of convention coverage despite a lack of breaking news. Here’s how it begins:

Every four years, the two presidential candidates do battle in a series of high-stakes televised events that could shape the outcome of the campaign. They also take part in some highly scripted programming where little real news is made and few viewers’ minds are changed.

Voters who take the word of elite political journalists would be forgiven for thinking that the first events are the presidential debates and the second are the party conventions, but as the political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien show, the truth is actually the opposite…

Read the whole thing for more.

I have a new review article in Perspectives on Politics critiquing Tim Groseclose’s book Left Turn that started as a blog post here way back in 2005 (gated; ungated). Here’s how it begins:

In 2005, University of California-Los Angeles political scientist Tim Groseclose and University of Missouri economist Jeff Milyo published a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE) claiming to provide quantitative evidence of what they call “strong liberal bias” in the media. Their estimates place 18 of the 20 national news outlets to the left of the centrist US voter. Not surprisingly, this claim has received a tremendous amount of media attention, particularly after Groseclose published a book based on the QJE results titled Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind and made appearances on “The O’Reilly Factor” and other news programs.

Few scholars of the political media would deny that media organizations tend to have different slants on the news. These differences are often significant and appear to be driven in large part by economic factors such as consumer demand and media competition. It is also true, as Groseclose and Milyo correctly note, that most journalists in the United States tend to be liberal and to vote Democratic.

However, these two facts do not necessarily imply that American media outlets have an overwhelming liberal bias. The policy preferences of reporters are only one of many possible influences on the content of the news. Numerous other competing journalistic norms and practices exist that limit the extent to which reporters’ personal views influence their reporting. As a result, previous studies of partisan bias in reporting on presidential elections have generally not found consistent results. So why did Groseclose and Milyo (hereafter GM) reach such different conclusions? A closer examination of their method reveals that their estimates of media bias—and Groseclose’s extensive extrapolations from those findings in Left Turn—rely on questionable assumptions about the processes generating citations of think tanks and interest groups by reporters and members of Congress, respectively.

GM’s model is built on the assumption that the advocacy process in which members of Congress cite think tanks and interest groups in floor speeches somehow parallels the journalistic process by which reporters cite those groups in their reporting. This assumption is the basis for their mapping of media outlets onto a comparable ideological scale as members of Congress and the public (refer to their QJE article for technical details). If the press is unbiased, GM suggest, media outlets will cite think tanks in news reporting in a fashion that is “balanced” with respect to the scores assigned to the groups based on Congressional citations, which were measured during the 1993–2002 period. Any deviation from their definition of the political center (a composite based on a weighted average of House and Senate adjusted ADA scores) is thus framed by GM as bias.

Many objections can be raised to GM’s methodology, the significant extrapolations that Groseclose makes from those findings in Left Turn, and the ungenerous tone of his responses to his critics (whom he repeatedly dismisses as “left-wing bloggers”). In this contribution, however, I will focus on GM’s identifying assumption that the processes generating journalistic and Congressional citations to the think tanks and interest groups in their sample are identical. Specifically, I show how three plausible deviations from this assumption provide alternative explanations for GM’s finding that the media are overwhelmingly liberal.

Read the whole thing for more.

I have a new column at CJR on journalistic and fact-checking failures in coverage of Harry Reid’s unsubstantiated claim that Mitt Romney has paid no taxes for ten years. Here’s how it begins:

A week ago, The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein and Ryan Grim published an article repeating Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s claim that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney hadn’t paid taxes for ten years. Though Reid provided no evidence other than hearsay about what he was told by an unnamed Bain investor (which HuffPost clarified in the ninth paragraph of the story), the story set in motion a controversy that exemplifies how partisans and ideologues exploit the structural weaknesses of journalism and factchecking.

Read the whole thing for more.

My new column at CJR examines how media hostility to Mitt Romney is helping to fuel the gaffe frenzies that frequently dominate coverage of his campaign and proposes a better approach to covering the horse race. Here’s how it begins:

The profane confrontation between one of Mitt Romney’s press aides and reporters at the end of the presumptive GOP nominee’s difficult overseas trip has brought new attention to the way the 2012 race is being covered in the press—in particular, the media’s embarrassing gaffe obsession and the incentives it provides for campaigns to place ever-greater limitations on access to their candidates in unscripted settings.

This dynamic has been especially pathological for Romney. Politico’s Jonathan Martin best captured how the presumptive GOP nominee’s relationship with the media has devolved into a self-perpetuating cycle of gaffes and access restrictions…

While the gaffe patrol isn’t the only reason that the presidential campaigns are placing such tight limitations on the press, any discussion of those issues should acknowledge the role that the media’s seeming hostility toward Romney is playing in the coverage and in the access restrictions that have been imposed by his campaign.

Read the whole thing for more.

Three new surveys illustrate just how persistent political misperceptions can be.

My research with Jason Reifler suggests that corrective information frequently fails to reduce beliefs in false or unsupported claims – a response that may be rooted in the threatening nature of unwelcome facts. While there are ways to present information more effectively, the extensive social science research we review in our New America report suggests that misperceptions are very difficult to counter.

These polls illustrate the challenge. First, the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released a new survey showing that 16% of Americans think President Obama is a Muslim and additional 36% don’t know his religion. Plotting the history of Pew surveys on this question, which date back to March 2008, shows that the misperception is disturbingly stable:

Of course, it’s possible that some of these respondents are expressing their dislike of Obama rather than a sincere factual belief, but others may refrain from expressing support for the Muslim claim to a survey interviewer – an effect that Reifler and I found may be substantial for white respondents who received corrective information with a non-white administrator present. The relative magnitude of these effects is unclear.

(Pew also found that only 51% of Americans know Mitt Romney is Mormon and 37% don’t know his religion, but there is no clear misperception – no more than 5% selected any of the other faiths provided in the question.)

Second, MIT political scientist Adam Berinsky, who is now conducting research on misperceptions, commissioned a YouGov poll earlier this month tracking support for the false claim that President Obama was not born in the United States. Initial polls, including those conducted by Berinsky, suggested misperceptions declined substantially after the release of Obama’s long-form birth certificate in April 2011, but he found that most of the decline had dissipated by January 2012. In his latest poll, Berinsky finds that birther beliefs are now higher than before the document’s release. The graphs below plot his results from immediately before and after the release of the document, January 2012, and July 2012 for all respondents and Republicans:

Finally, my Dartmouth Government department colleague Ben Valentino recently coordinated a YouGov survey on U.S. foreign policy supported by the Tobin Project that included two questions on highly persistent misperceptions – the belief that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the U.S. invasion in 2003 (one of the topics of my first article with Reifler) and the birther myth.

Harris polls from 2003-2006 show that the WMD myth bottomed out just under 40% before a bump upward in mid-2006 that may have been the result of bogus hype about the discovery of degraded chemical weapons from the 1980s. Valentino found that 32% continued to endorse those claims now. While this estimate represents a decline from the 2005-2006 period, it’s a relatively modest one, especially considering the time that has elapsed since then and the increased unpopularity of the war in Iraq and President Bush since 2006. Since Valentino used nearly identical wording to Harris, I’ve plotted his results along with theirs using a flexible polynomial fit:

As we would expect, the results are strikingly different by partisanship, so I’ve also disaggregated his survey results by party (leaners are not included in the Democratic and Republican totals in this or the subsequent graph):

63% of Republicans believe Iraq had WMD compared with only 27% of independents/other and 15% of Democrats.

For the birther question, Valentino sought to probe self-reported belief change by asking respondents to indicate not just their current belief but whether their views about Obama’s place of birth had changed. In all, he found that 26% selected “I have always believed President Obama was born in another country” and an additional 6% selected “I used to think President Obama was born in the United States, but now I think he was born in another country.” Here is a bar chart broken out by party with responses grouped by the respondent’s current beliefs:

Only 22% of Republicans said they believe Obama was born in this country, compared with 41% of independents/other and 79% of Democrats. By contrast, a shocking 63% of Republicans indicated they now believe Obama was not born in the U.S. – a much higher estimate than Berinsky’s data (presumably a result of differences in question wording). Again, even if some of these responses do not reflect sincere belief, there is no denying the resilience of misperceptions against even the strongest and most concrete documentary evidence.

[Cross-posted at HuffPost Pollster]

I have a new column up at CJR on the media’s continued failure to accurately describe the competing tax proposals from the two parties. Here’s how it begins:

Yesterday, the Senate held symbolic votes on a pair of high-profile tax bills with important implications for the November election. Senators narrowly rejected a Republican-backed extension of all the Bush-era tax cuts in favor of a Democratic proposal that would preserve lower rates for taxable income below $200,000 per individual, or $250,000 per family, while allowing reductions in tax rates on income above those thresholds to expire.

Unfortunately, even though the debate over extending the Bush-era tax cuts has been a key point of contention between the parties since Obama took office, many reporters still haven’t learned how to accurately describe the competing proposals to their readers.

Read the whole thing for more.

For those who are interested, video is now available of a short presentation I gave at a conference on “Truthiness in Digital Media” at Harvard’s Berkman Center in March:

I have a new column up at CJR on how fact-checkers can’t resolve the controversy over Mitt Romney’s involvement at Bain Capital during the 1999-2002 period. Here’s how it begins:

Fact-checkers have played a key role in the controversy over Mitt Romney’s role in outsourcing at Bain Capital, but the way the debate has played out reveals the limitations of the genre.

First, fact-checks sometimes help create controversies that paradoxically increase the attention paid to misleading charges. For this reason, political consultants will sometimes intentionally make misleading claims in order to increase the amount of “earned media” their ads will attract. While we can’t know the intentions of the President or his campaign team, their ads charging Romney with outsourcing at Bain Capital have been shown to be misleading by Factcheck.org and The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, but the debate over the issue has come to dominate the presidential race.

Read the whole thing for more.