Brendan Nyhan

This announcement is annoying:

Ted Koppel, the former anchor of “Nightline” on ABC, has been named a contributing columnist for The New York Times. His column will appear on the Op-Ed page periodically.

Mr. Koppel’s appointment, which is effective Jan. 29, was announced by Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page.

Separately, NPR announced yesterday that Mr. Koppel had agreed to join the radio network as senior news analyst in June. NPR said Mr. Koppel would contribute analysis, commentary and perspective about 50 times a year.

In addition, Mr. Koppel is to serve as an analyst of breaking news and special events. His work will also appear at www.NPR.org and on NPR podcasts.

Nightline was a relatively serious news show by the low standards of our political media, but Ted Koppel is highly overrated as a journalist. For an example of his failure to take his responsibility to debunk false information seriously, consider this exchange from an interview with Larry King after the first Bush-Gore debate:

KING: Okay. Were you impressed with this “fuzzy [math],” top 1 percent, 1.3 trillion, 1.9 trillion bit?

KOPPEL: You know, honestly, it turns my brains to mush. I can’t pretend for a minute that I’m really able to follow the argument of the debates. Parts of it, yes. Parts of it, I haven’t a clue what they’re talking about.

That is a professional embarrassment. Doctors don’t say that information given to them by patients turns their brains “to mush.” But Koppel, who ABC paid millions of dollars, couldn’t be bothered to figure out the issues at stake in a presidential debate.

More generally, why do media outlets insist on giving precious commentary slots as rewards to supposedly distinguished old journalists? Think of David Broder at the Washington Post or Daniel Schorr at NPR. And the ironic part is that the Times is trying to charge people for its op-eds. I feel confident saying that no one on earth is willing to pay money to read Ted Koppel’s fascinating insights into the world of politics. His “Meet the Press” appearance with Tom Brokaw was some of the most boring television that I’ve ever seen.

Update 2/1: Jack Shafer points out that Broder has been a columnist since middle age; my apologies for the error. A better way to put my argument is this: why do newspapers persist in drawing their columnists from the ranks of reporters, when the reporter’s mindset generally makes for bad columns? Nick Kristof, Broder, Koppel and many other ex-reporters fit this profile.

I have previously criticized the methodology of the Groseclose/Milyo media bias study (PDF). But at the end of a diatribe attacking it on the American Progress website, Eric Alterman takes a cheap shot at the authors:

Check the fine print and one finds this study — naively touted as both objective and significant by the UCLA public affairs office and published, inexplicably, by the previously respected Quarterly Journal of Economics, edited at Harvard University’s Department of Economics — was the product of a significant investment by right-wing think tanks. In 2000-2001, Groseclose was a Hoover Institution national fellow, while Milyo has been granted $40,500 from the American Enterprise Institute; both were Heritage Foundation Salvatori fellows in 1997.

This phrasing suggests that the funding Groseclose and Milyo received from Hoover and AEI supported this paper. But as the authors make clear, their home universities (UCLA and Missouri-St. Louis, respectively) “paid our
salaries, funded our research assistants, and paid for services such as Lexis-Nexis, which were necessary
for our data collection. No other organization or person helped to fund this research project.” They even went so far as to choose research assistants “so that
approximately half our data was coded by Gore supporters and half by Bush supporters.” Alterman’s attack is misleading. Yes, Groseclose and Milyo have been associated with conservative groups, but that doesn’t mean that all their research is “the product” of those groups.

Update 1/12: I’m currently discussing the study on KTLK 100.3 in Minnesota.

During a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars yesterday, President Bush engaged in yet another attack on dissent:

We face an added challenge in the months ahead: The campaign season will
soon be upon us — and that means our nation must carry on this war in an
election year. There is a vigorous debate about the war in Iraq today, and
we should not fear the debate. It’s one of the great strengths of our
democracy that we can discuss our differences openly and honestly — even
in times of war. Yet we must remember there is a difference between
responsible and irresponsible debate — and it’s even more important to
conduct this debate responsibly when American troops are risking their
lives overseas.

The American people know the difference between responsible and
irresponsible debate when they see it. They know the difference between
honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and
partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because
of Israel, or because we misled the American people. And they know the
difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and
defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right.

When our soldiers hear politicians in Washington question the mission they
are risking their lives to accomplish, it hurts their morale. In a time of
war, we have a responsibility to show that whatever our political
differences at home, our nation is united and determined to prevail. And
we have a responsibility to our men and women in uniform — who deserve to
know that once our politicians vote to send them into harm’s way, our
support will be with them in good days and in bad days — and we will
settle for nothing less than complete victory.

We also have an opportunity this year to show the Iraqi people what
responsible debate in a democracy looks like. In a free society, there is
only one check on political speech — and that’s the judgment of the
people. So I ask all Americans to hold their elected leaders to account,
and demand a debate that brings credit to our democracy — not comfort to
our adversaries.

Note the juxtaposition Bush makes between “a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong” and “defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right.” So people who think the war is doomed to fail are disloyal? Similarly, at the end of the passage, Bush suggests that debate about the war hurts troop morale and that questioning of the war brings “comfort to our adversaries.” In short, he claims that “It’s one of the great strengths of our democracy that we can discuss our differences openly and honestly — even
in times of war,” but then attempts to rule out as “irresponsible” any debate that questions the war he initiated.

Isn’t our democracy strong enough to survive people questioning the war? Isn’t that the whole point of democracy?

(Postscript: It’s also disturbing that the print version of the New York Times report on Bush’s speech is headlined “In Strong Words, Bush Defines Terms of Debate on Iraq.” Says who? Apparently someone realized that the headline implicitly endorsed Bush’s attack on dissent because the online headline now reads “In Strong Words, Bush Tries to Redirect Debate on Iraq.”)

Update 1/12: During a speech in Kentucky, Bush said that “one
way people can help [in the war on terror] as we’re coming down the pike in the 2006 elections, is
remember the effect that rhetoric can have on our troops in harm’s way, and
the effect that rhetoric can have in emboldening or weakening an enemy.” How can rhetoric weaken an enemy? And it’s silly to suggest that people can help the war on terror by what they say in domestic political debate. Does Bush think Al Qaeda is watching “Meet the Press” every week? Listening to C-SPAN call-ins?

Jon Henke at Q&O attacks my post on the ugly racial history of George Allen, a Republican senator and 2008 presidential contender:

I’ll ask Brendan: do you actually believe George Allen to be racist? Specifically:

• Are you alleging that the noose in his office was a reflection of Allen’s feelings about black people, as opposed to being part of a western and/or legal motif?
• Are you alleging that the Confederate flag was a specific reflection of Allen’s racism, rather than an innocuous part of a flag collection?
• How should a Southern State — the “Capital of the Confederacy” — formally remember its history? Can a Virginia Governor recognize Confederate History without being racist, or is there nothing but slavery to Confederate History?

The answers to these questions all appear in my original post, but I’ll walk Henke back through them from the sake of clarity.

On the subject of whether I’m claiming Allen is a racist, let me quote from the original post:

Despite reader claims to the contrary, I’m not saying Allen is a racist — I have no way of knowing what his private thoughts are. I can only judge him on his public actions and statements, and that record is troubling at best.

On the subject of the noose, again, I don’t know that it reflects Allen’s feelings about black people, but, as I wrote, “if the noose ‘has nothing to do with lynching,’ why was it hung from a tree? The symbolism seems obvious. As the Richmond Times-Dispatch put it in 2000, the noose was ‘a reminder that [Allen] saw some justification in frontier justice.’ Official hangings carried out under the auspices of the law presumably used real gallows, not trees.”

The same goes for the Confederate flag. I don’t claim that displaying it in his home makes Allen a racist, but it’s still troubling in the context of his history on racial issues.

Finally, the Confederacy was obviously not only about slavery, but it is inextricably linked to it. And yet here is how Allen memorialized the Confederacy, according to the Washington Post: “[I]n the late 1990s, former governor George Allen (R) issued a Confederate History Month proclamation, calling the Civil War ‘a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights’… The declaration made no mention of slavery, angering many civil rights groups.” So let me ask this: Is it appropriate to remember the Confederacy as a struggle for “independence and sovereign rights” without even mentioning the great evil it sought to perpetrate?

People have such a hard time with criticism of politicians who exploit racial issues. The typical response, as with Henke, is to equate such criticism with an accusation of racism — a move that attempts to shift the terms of debate from publicly observable actions and statements to private feelings. We can’t run a democracy based on speculation about the inner life of our leaders. All we can do is judge them based on what they do and say. And on that basis, George Allen fails to meet the standards I expect from someone who wants to be the president of the United States.

(Postscript: A great example of this is the presidential candidacy of George H.W. Bush in 1988. He aggressively exploited the obviously race-coded issue of Willie Horton. It was reprehensible. Does that prove that Bush hates black people? No, but it was loathsome nonetheless.)

In the special Economist issue “The World in 2006,” US editor John Micklethwait notes the setbacks suffered by President Bush during 2005 — the failure of Social Security privatization, our struggles in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the DeLay scandals — before offering this ridiculous analysis (sub. required):

As a result, a president who stormed back to power in 2004 with more votes than any previous candidate will spend a good deal of 2006 on the defensive.

Using the number of votes as a metric of electoral success is ridiculous. (Ever heard of population growth?) By more standard metrics such as presidents’ popular vote and Electoral College margins, Bush’s re-election victory was one of the closest in history, as Ron Brownstein pointed out in the Los Angeles Times:

Measured as a share of the popular vote, Bush beat Kerry by just 2.9 percentage points: 51% to 48.1%. That’s the smallest margin of victory for a reelected president since 1828.

The only previous incumbent who won a second term nearly so narrowly was Democrat Woodrow Wilson: In 1916, he beat Republican Charles E. Hughes by 3.1 percentage points. Apart from Truman in 1948 (whose winning margin was 4.5 percentage points), every other president elected to a second term since 1832 has at least doubled the margin that Bush had over Kerry.

In that 1916 election, Wilson won only 277 out of 531 electoral college votes. That makes Wilson the only reelected president in the past century who won with fewer electoral college votes than Bush’s 286.

Measured another way, Bush won 53% of the 538 electoral college votes available this year. Of all the chief executives reelected since the 12th Amendment separated the vote for president and vice president — a group that stretches back to Thomas Jefferson in 1804 — only Wilson (at 52%) won a smaller share of the available electoral college votes.

Not exactly storming back to power. So why does Micklethwait make it sound like the Bush decline was such a surprise? He lost the popular vote in 2000, he barely won it in 2004, his 9/11 popularity boost has finally worn off, and second-term presidents tend to be unpopular. Do the math.

I previously slammed this awful Rasmussen poll question about President Bush’s no-warrant wiretap program:

Should the National Security Agency be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States?

As I wrote, the obvious answer is yes, but the question is whether the NSA should have to obtain a warrant before doing so. The question fails to mention the warrant issue, and therefore the widely touted figure of 64 percent approval for Bush’s policy is meaningless.

Via Atrios and Think Progress, here is a much better question from a new Associated Press poll (PDF), which yields very different results:

Should the Bush administration be required to get a warrant from a judge before monitoring phone and
internet communications between American citizens in the United States and suspected terrorists, or should
the government be allowed to monitor such communications without a warrant?

Should be required to get
a warrant…………………………………… 56
Should be allowed to monitor
without a warrant……………………….. 42
Not sure………………………………….. 2

Will the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Pat Buchanan and the many others who touted the Rasmussen poll retract or modify their previous comments? Not likely.

How long will everyone love the senator from Arizona? Based on this Franklin Foer post from TNR’s blog The Plank, not long:

Earlier this week Hotline excerpted a dispatch on a forthcoming John McCain visit to South Carolina. Buried inside there was a stunning revelation. It quoted McCain’s spokesman, one Richard Quinn. He described McCain as a “strong advocate for the [Martin Luther] King Day” in Arizona. What makes this so stunning? In the 2000 race, McCain took heat for working with Quinn, who once edited the neo-Confederate journal The Southern Partisan. You may recall that this journal published apologias for slavery and that Quinn once advocated voting for David Duke. During McCain’s contentious primary race with Bush, McCain declined to distance himself from Quinn. He claimed no knowledge of Quinn’s writings. But a lot of time has passed since then. By now, McCain should have taken the opportunity to thumb through Quinn’s work. I’m sure that McCain very badly wants the presidency. Does he really want it this badly? (Here’s a People for the American Way dossier on Quinn’s revanchist politics that McCain might want to check out.)

Endorsing George Wallace, Jr., praising Trent Lott and now employing Richard Quinn? The requirements for winning southern GOP primaries are taking McCain backward on race. As The Hotline pointed out, this is going to endanger his “straight talk” reputation.

(Previous installments: I and II.)

The graphic tagline for a discussion on Fox News that I saw this morning: “Is Wall Street worried liberals are forgetting 9/11?”

Much is being made of former RNC chair Ed Gillespie’s decision to sign on with George Allen’s PAC — an important sign of establishment support for the Virginia Senator’s 2008 campaign. Does that mean Gillespie isn’t concerned about Allen’s ugly racial history? Does he even know about it?

Andrew Sullivan nails my reaction to Dick Cheney’s nonsense:

Try reconciling what we know for a fact about what the administration has done and the words uttered by the vice-president yesterday:

I was in Washington in the 1970s, at a time when there was great and legitimate concern about civil liberties and about potential abuses within the executive branch. I had the honor of serving as White House Chief of Staff to President Ford, and that experience shapes my own outlook to this very day.

Serving immediately after a period of turmoil, all of us in the Ford administration worked hard to restore people’s confidence in the government. We were adamant about following the law and protecting civil liberties of all Americans, and we did so. Three decades later, I work for a President who shares those same values. He has made clear from the outset, both publicly and privately, that our duty to uphold the law of the land admits no exceptions in wartime. The President himself put it best: He said, “We are in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them.”

So why violate our principles by authorizing torture of detainees? Why retain the right to torture them even after a law has been passed to prevent it? Why violate the terms of the 1978 law that was precisely a result of the worries about civil liberties after Vietnam and Watergate?