Brendan Nyhan

For those who are interested, I did an interview with On the Media’s Bob Garfield about my CJR piece on the dispute over Romney and outsourcing at Bain Capital:

An addendum: People seem to be having difficulty holding two seemingly contradictory facts in their minds at the same time:

1. The claims made in President Obama’s ads suggesting Mitt Romney shipped jobs overseas cannot be substantiated using the available evidence. There is no direct evidence that he played an active role in the decisions made by the Bain companies in question.

2. The accounts provided by Romney and Bain of his legal status during the key 1999-2002 period are murky and not fully consistent with the available evidence. Romney may have been involved in some way with Bain or the companies in which it invested; we don’t know how much.

As I say in the interview, it’s reasonable to argue that Romney was morally responsible for the actions taken by Bain given his formal role and ownership stake. But the Obama campaign has gone much further. Reporters need to dig deeper and help resolve these questions. With that said, the tension between #1 and #2 is unlikely to go away. Journalists or commentators need to learn to negotiate the tension between those two facts, awkward as it may be.

I have a new column up at CJR on the need for better media coverage of the Obama campaign’s claims about Mitt Romney outsourcing jobs. Here’s how it begins:

Last Tuesday, the Obama campaign released a new ad here and in eight other swing states that distorts the facts in a Washington Post story to implicate Mitt Romney in outsourcing by firms that received funds from Bain Capital.

The ad, which is titled “Believes,” reinforces a critique of Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital that the Obama campaign has frequently repeated in the weeks since the Post story was first published, including during a speech by the President in Durham, NH two weeks ago. In particular, Obama is running a series of ads drawing on the Post story, including a new ad released on Saturday that will run here in New Hampshire and in other battleground states.

Given the prominence of these claims in the campaign debate, the need for reporters to help voters make sense of them is especially great. However, journalists who have covered the story both here in New Hampshire and nationally have largely failed to fact-check the Obama campaign’s claims…

Read the whole thing for more.

I have a new column at CJR on commentators’ efforts to frame the Supreme Court’s ruling on health care reform as an important event in the narrative of the 2012 election. Here’s how it begins:

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision upholding most of the Affordable Care Act has vast implications for health policy in this country and will affect millions of people’s lives. Much of the early coverage, fortunately, reflected those substantive concerns. Predictably, however, some political reporters and commentators felt compelled to weigh in with crass speculation on the effect of the decision on the presidential campaign.

To be sure, many journalists were appropriately cautious about claims that the decision would have a significant impact on the race. As Richard Dunham pointed out in the San Francisco Chronicle, “most political analysts expect the economy to remain the dominant issue in November.” Indeed, the economy remains the most important issue for voters (see point #6). Moreover, since most voters already have made up their minds about health care reform, it’s unclear who will be swayed by the ruling.

Other commentators, however, were eager to frame the event as a “turning point” in the campaign…

Read the whole thing for more.

It’s not Sunday without the comic stylings of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who drew a bizarre analogy yesterday between Moore’s law and the effect of social networking sites on political leadership:

In 1965, Gordon Moore, the Intel co-founder, posited Moore’s Law, which stipulated that the processing power that could be placed on a single microchip would double every 18 to 24 months. It’s held up quite well since then. Watching European, Arab and U.S. leaders grappling with their respective crises, I’m wondering if there isn’t a political corollary to Moore’s Law: The quality of political leadership declines with every 100 million new users of Facebook and Twitter.

The wiring of the world through social media and Web-enabled cellphones is changing the nature of conversations between leaders and the led everywhere. We’re going from largely one-way conversations — top-down — to overwhelmingly two-way conversations — bottom-up and top-down. This has many upsides: more participation, more innovation and more transparency. But can there be such a thing as too much participation — leaders listening to so many voices all the time and tracking the trends that they become prisoners of them?

My favorite part is the faux precision – why 100 million? Why not 50 million? Or 200 million? Moreover, the complaint that political leaders are too responsive to the public is an old one, but at least in the US, the recent increase in elite partisanship has arguably made leaders less responsive to the public, not more. It’s not clear that social media has changed that trend in any significant way.

I find this passage significant less for its content than its style, which is classic Friedman, the man who Matt Taibbi famously described as having an “anti-ear” that is “absolutely infallible.” And if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Friedman over the years, it’s that he loves to recycle the same hackneyed catchphrases and cringe-inducing metaphors, including turning lemons into lemonade (7x), “Show me the money!” (3x), and “Houston, we have a problem” (2x).

Surprise! Friedman loves Moore’s law analogies too — here are three more from the archives. My favorite is the 1999 one about modems:

“Europe is using $7-a-gallon gasoline to stimulate the market for electric cars; China is using $5-a-gallon and naming electric cars as one of the industrial pillars for its five-year growth plan. And America? President Obama has directed stimulus money at electric cars, but he is unwilling to do the one thing that would create the sustained consumer pull required to grow an electric car industry here: raise taxes on gasoline. Price matters. Sure, the Moore’s Law of electric cars — “the cost per mile of the electric car battery will be cut in half every 18 months” — will steadily drive the cost down, says Agassi, but only once we get scale production going. U.S. companies can do that on their own or in collaboration with Chinese ones. But God save us if we don’t do it at all.” (9/26/10)

“Here’s one way to start [an imagined speech by President Obama]: “My fellow Americans, I want to speak to you about a new economic law. You’ve heard of Moore’s Law in information technology. I’d like to speak to you about the ‘Law of More’ in energy technology. Americans, Indians, Chinese, Africans, we all want more — more comfort in our homes, more mobility in our lives, more technologies with which to innovate. But there is only one way all 6.3 billion of us can have more and not make this an unlivable planet, and that is by living our lives and running our businesses in more sustainable ways and properly accounting for it.” (4/26/09)

“Indeed, the faster your kid’s modem, the faster he or she can get on line, the stronger must be his or her own personal software. You’ve heard of Moore’s Law, that the performance of microprocessors doubles every year and the price halves every year? Well, here (with tongue slightly in cheek) is Friedman’s Law: Parents should add one hour per week of quality time with their children each time the speed of their kid’s modem doubles.” (6/1/99)

I have a new column at CJR on how Mitt Romney has increasingly been portrayed as “confident” since his campaign chances have improved. Here’s how it begins:

One of the most frequent problems with campaign reporting is the way that journalists construct candidate-centric narratives that coincide with the ups and downs of the race.

We’ve seen this pattern recur with Mitt Romney in the last few weeks. The weak May jobs report and economic turmoil in Europe have helped to push down the estimated probability of President Obama’s re-election on the Intrade futures market by approximately five percentage points this month. With the GOP finally closing ranks behind its presumptive nominee, Romney’s chances of winning appear stronger than ever.

As if on cue, the press corps that previously savaged Romney as a flip-flopper and phony has started to portray him in a more positive light (though soul-crushingly stupid gaffe coverage continues).

In particular, Romney’s manner on the campaign trail, which has previously been derided as wooden and inauthentic, is now being described as more “confident,” which is journalism-speak for “seeming more likely to win.”

Read the whole thing for more.

I have a new column at CJR challenging claims that gaffes affect election outcomes and therefore deserve saturation coverage. Here’s how it begins:

Since Friday, the national political conversation has been dominated by a debate over the importance of President Obama’s statement, at a White House press conference, that “The private sector is doing fine.”

Unfortunately, most of the media discussion has focused on strategy rather than policy. At The Washington Post, Chris Cillizza led off a Sunday column with the assertion that “gaffes matter” in shaping election outcomes. Two days earlier, his Post colleague Karen Tumulty described the president’s remark as a “gift” Obama had “handed to Republicans”…

These claims are representative of the way journalists routinely promote the importance of these sorts of pseudo-controversies, even though there is little convincing evidence that gaffes affect presidential election outcomes. The problem is particularly acute during the summer doldrums between the end of the primary campaigns and the party conventions. As we’ve seen, a bored press corps with space to fill can easily lose perspective.

Read the whole thing for more.

My new column at CJR is a visually annotated guide for journalists of how to provide responsible birther coverage without reenforcing the myth. Here’s how it begins:

In a series of media interviews conducted before a Las Vegas fundraiser with presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Donald Trump singlehandedly put the debunked birther movement back in the news. The resulting coverage is unlikely to change the outcome of the race, but it could help fuel the resurgence of false beliefs about President Obama’s birthplace.

Read the whole thing for more.

I have a new column at Columbia Journalism Review on the way the media has overhyped the risk that Mitt Romney will be “defined” in early campaign skirmishes. Here’s how it begins:

The message war in the presidential election got underway in earnest last week, with the Obama campaign releasing a new attack ad and super PACs on both sides announcing their own big buys. If you believe some prominent voices in the political press, the stakes in these exchanges are already extremely high—especially for Mitt Romney, the likely GOP standard-bearer.

Many reporters and commentators have suggested that Obama could “define Romney” in the minds of the public—or at least, that he’s trying to do so—and thus establish an image now that would prevent Romney from winning in November. Evidence for the idea that we’re now in a crucial part of the campaign, however, is generally lacking.

Read the whole thing for more.