Brendan Nyhan

I have a new column at Columbia Journalism Review on how bored reporters and social media can hype fake controversies and spread misinformation. Here’s how it begins:

When Rick Santorum suspended his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination on Tuesday, he removed any remaining doubt that Mitt Romney would be the Republican presidential nominee. The result is a news vacuum that can easily be filled by spin and misinformation.

Consider the ridiculous debate over comments made on CNN about stay-at-home moms by Hilary Rosen, which dominated the news cycle and the political Twittersphere yesterday. As NBC’s First Read points out, while “manufactured controversies are nothing new in American politics,” what is new “is how much faster and professionalized—due to Twitter and the drive to make something go viral—these manufactured controversies have become.” Such controversies can be especially potent as we enter what First Read calls “silly season.” When few competing stories exist and political reporters are starved for material, any whiff of scandal or controversy can create a feeding frenzy. A bored media is dangerous for politicians.

Read the whole thing for more.

I have a new post up at Columbia Journalism Review on how the media’s focus on swing states and voter demographics misses the big picture. Here’s how it begins:

With Mitt Romney’s hold on the GOP nomination becoming too obvious to deny, horse race enthusiasts in the political media have quickly shifted to handicapping the general election. Unfortunately, their recent focus on key states and demographics—in particular, the effects of the contraception controversy on women voters in battleground states—threatens to obscure more fundamental factors that are most likely to shape the outcome of the campaign.

Read the whole thing for more.

The first Obama scandal has arrived.

Last May, I wrote a column on how the Obama administration had managed to avoid scandal* for longer than we might otherwise expect:

My research (PDF) on presidential scandals shows that few presidents avoid scandal for as long as he has. In the 1977-2008 period, the longest that a president has gone without having a scandal featured in a front-page Washington Post article is 34 months – the period between when President Bush took office in January 2001 and the Valerie Plame scandal in October 2003. Obama has already made it almost as long despite the lack of a comparable event to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Why?

I attributed Obama’s resilience in part to “the number and magnitude of competing news stories” during his tenure, which I show play a key role in the likelihood and severity of presidential scandal (PDF). (See Jonathan Alter’s Washington Monthly piece for a discussion of other possible explanations.) However, I predicted that the “the likelihood of a presidential or executive branch scandal before the 2012 election are quite high” and that, “[g]iven Obama’s reputation for personal integrity, the controversy will likely concern actions taken within the executive branch.”

Obama survived for longer than I expected since that column was published. Despite close calls with Solyndra and Operation Fast and Furious, Obama broke George W. Bush’s record in October for the longest scandal-free period among presidents in the contemporary era using the measure described above from my research (a front-page Washington Post story focused on a scandal that describes it as such in the reporter’s own voice) — see Elspeth Reeve’s coverage at The Atlantic Wire here and here.

Today, however, my predictions were validated when the Washington Post published a front-page story that twice describes a controversy over alleged excessive spending at a General Services Administration conference in Las Vegas as a “scandal.” In print, the story ran under the headline “GSA rocked by spending scandal” (PDF). While this controversy seems unlikely to have much staying power or to damage Obama politically, its emergence is consistent with the news cycle theory I advance — the improving economy and Mitt Romney’s impending triumph in the Republican presidential nomination race have reduced the newsworthiness of two stories that have dominated the news in recent months, which in turn increases the likelihood that allegations of unethical or improper behavior will receive prominent coverage. The question now is whether the GSA controversy signals the resumption of scandal politics as usual in Washington.

* I define scandal as a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing. My research analyzes the effects of political and media context on when scandals are thought to have occurred, not whether Obama or other presidents actually engaged in misbehavior (a question that cannot easily be measured or quantified objectively).

I have a new post for Columbia Journalism Review answering media coverage about the effectiveness of fact-checking. Here’s how it begins:

Politics today seemingly has more fact-checking than ever before. As a result, reporters are asking a new question: Does fact-checking work?

At the national level, USA Today’s Martha T. Moore described it as “an article of faith” among fact-checkers that “factually accurate information is something voters want and need, and they provide plenty of it.” Unfortunately, she writes, “[w]hat they can’t seem to do is get politicians to stop saying things that aren’t true”…

A similar concern was expressed in an analysis piece by Henry J. Gomez titled “Even in an age of fact-check journalism, the political whopper lives” that was published Saturday in The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. As T.C. Brown, CJR’s Ohio Swing States Project correspondent, notes, the piece centers on Ohio Treasurer and GOP Senate candidate Josh Mandel, whom Gomez notes “has received three of PolitiFact Ohio’s seven most recent Pants on Fire rulings.” In total, six of his fourteen rated statements since 2010 “have been deemed Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire.”

“Why do they do it?” Gomez asks. “Those who study politics and communications say the consequences appear to be minimal, at least for the liars.”

Read the whole thing for more.

My new post for Columbia Journalism Review examines how the press has covered the Romney/Etch-a-Sketch controversy. Here how it begins:

Yesterday, Etch-a-Sketch became the media’s favorite metaphor for Mitt Romney’s ideological flexibility. But the iconic children’s toy is an equally good representation of the media’s tendency to draw the picture it wants of our political candidates.

Read the whole thing for more.

Why did Democrats do so poorly in the 2010 elections? The median academic forecast was 44 to 45 seats (PDF). However, Republicans significantly outperformed expectations in picking up 66 seats in the House and six seats in the Senate.

After the election, John Sides, Eric McGhee, and I found that Democratic incumbents who voted the most controversial legislation of the 2008-2010 period — TARP, the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and health care reform — performed significantly worse than those who voted no on those bills. Seth Masket and Steven Greene reached a similar conclusion about the effects of supporting health care reform on the vote share received by the most conservative House Democrats who ran for re-election.

Afterward, we joined forces Voltron-style and produced a new article (gated; ungated) that is forthcoming in a special issue of American Politics Research on the 2010 election. In it, we show that the roll call effect on vote share was driven by health care reform. Democratic incumbents who voted yes performed significantly worse than those who did not. Even among a more comparable set of members and districts that we isolate using statistical matching procedures, the estimated effect of support is -5.8 percentage points. We then provide simulation evidence suggesting that Democrats would win approximately 25 more seats if those in competitive districts had voted no, which accounts for the gap between the academic forecasts and the observed outcomes.*

Why did health care reform have such dramatic effects? Individual-level survey data shows that health care reform supporters were seen as more liberal and thus more ideologically distant from voters.

Using mediation analysis, we then show that perceived ideological distance appears to be the key mechanism linking incumbent support for health care reform with individual-level opposition among their constituents. In short, support for health care reform is associated with greater perceived ideological distance, which in turn is associated with a reduced likelihood of supporting the incumbent.

Going forward, the implications for 2012 are less clear. As Sides notes, the economy is the dominant issue in the presidential race and most of the vulnerable Democratic incumbents in Congress lost in 2010. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see whether challengers can successfully target any remaining Democrats in competitive districts or states who supported health care reform. Will it hurt the party again?

Of course, none of this is to say that Democrats should have declined to pursue health care reform, which was arguably their party’s top policy priority after the 2008 election. Parties are frequently willing to pay an electoral penalty to enact their preferred policy agenda. What our analysis shows, however, is that the costs of passing the legislation were significant.

* As Kevin Collins and Jonathan Chait point out, it’s possible that news coverage and GOP ads would have focused on the other roll call votes and that they would have had correspondingly greater effects on vulnerable Democrats. In that case, the net effect of supporting health care reform on Democratic losses in 2010 might have been reduced or eliminated. For more on these counterfactuals, see the responses from John Sides and Eric McGhee. See also Seth Masket on how some media coverage has distorted our findings.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]

My new CJR column examines coverage of Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio’s birther press conference as a case study in how news reporting can reinforce misperceptions:

Last Tuesday, the New America Foundation released a report (PDF) I co-authored with Georgia State’s Jason Reifler on how to most effectively combat misperceptions (summarized here at CJR). Two days later, some of the nation’s press corps decided to illustrate what not to do instead.

The occasion was the implausible claim by Joe Arpaio, the controversial and high-profile sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, that President Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery. The claim was covered by Politico, the Associated Press, the New York Post, The Arizona Republic, and discussed on the cable news networks.

Read the whole thing for more.