Brendan Nyhan

Atrios notes a strange Annenberg poll that is written up in a completely misleading way by the AP:

Is Annenberg This Stupid?

Read this:

WASHINGTON (AP) — About 40 percent of Americans say they consider talk show host Bill O’Reilly a journalist – more than would define famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward the same way, according to a poll conducted this spring.

Only 30 percent said Woodward, who broke the Watergate story with Carl Bernstein, was a journalist. More than a quarter said talk show host Rush Limbaugh was one, while one in five said they considered newspaper columnist George Will to be a journalist.

Poll respondents were simply asked, “Please tell me if you think (the individual named) is a journalist or not?” The question made no specific reference to differences between reporters and commentators….

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said the results of the poll suggest the public defines the word “journalist” far differently than those in the press define it.

This poll tells us nothing about who people believe is a journalist. It just tells us who has name recognition. This question reads like a test and people are going to try to give the “right” answer. What a stupid stupid poll.

He’s right — it’s almost a pure test of name recognition. The fact that (a) more people know who Bill O’Reilly is than Bob Woodward and (b) they acquiesced to the interviewer’s label of “journalist” has no clear implications for what the public thinks about journalism.

Update 6/14: Writing on Wonkette, Fred Becker rightly mocks Howard Kurtz’s story about the poll:

It turns out that Kurtz has written the story backwards. You know who those polled say they consider to be a journalist? People on the TV! Peter Jennings, say 79 percent of the respondents, followed by Mike Wallace (64 percent), Katie Couric (48 percent).

If that’s not proof that these results are driven by name recognition, I don’t know what is.

Continuing my series debunking fantasies about third parties, Walter Dellinger raises yet another major obstacle facing any third party candidate in an email to Mickey Kaus:

Walter Dellinger emails about the possibility of a McCain third-party presidential run (should McCain fail to get the GOP nomination):

There is one final barrier to a third party candidacy, however, that may be dispositive. Even if you get over “Duverger’s Law” about the tendency to vote for the top two, and the winner-take-all state-by-state character of the Electoral College, the real problem is the House of Representatives which will choose the President from among the top three in electoral votes unless one of the three candidates gets an absolute majority of all electoral votes. Thus, if each of the major party candidates can simply scrape together one-fourth of the total electoral votes, the election will be decided by the House, each state delegation casting a single vote with the votes of 26 state delegations necessary to a win. Regardless of how their district and states vote, there will be very strong party pressure on both Republican and Democratic members of Congress to cast a party vote. There will be no Independent party members in the House, making it virtually impossible for McCain to assemble 26 states even assuming he runs first by a significant margin.

I agree with you that in a three way race it is quite possible that John McCain could finish first in both the popular vote and the electoral vote. But that isn’t enough. McCain would need 270 electoral votes — an absolute majority. Otherwise, given the shape of the House in 2008, all the Republican candidate needs in a three way race is to finish third.

Hmmm. The only responses I can think of now are: 1) If McCain wins, say, 45% of electoral votes vs. 25 and 30, plus a similar plurality of the popular votes, there will be a lot of pressure on the House to pick him; and 2) Maybe his third party should also run some candidates for the House! But some readers may have a better answer. (Send them to Mickey underscore Kaus at msn dot com.)

P.S.: Dellinger’s response to point (1):

Sure, I agree that at the outer margin (McCain 45, Dem 30, Republican 25) the House might crumble to popular McCain fever. But it would be tough to pull off such a landslide. One point for your argument — Those numbers are percentages of electoral votes. If McCain actually got that percentage of popular votes–beating one major party candidate by 15% and the other by 20% (or anywhere close to that margin) he would very likely win an electoral vote landslide and avoid the House. Still, that is very, very tough. Much tougher than (merely) finishing first in the popular and electoral votes.

Doesn’t mean he won’t try!

But it doesn’t mean he has a serious chance of winning either! And the idea of a McCain party winning any House seats in 2008 is borderline farcical. The barriers to third parties are even higher in Congressional races.

Immediate reactions to Howard Dean’s latest ill-advised statements and the firestorm they’ve created:
1) I told you so (for past outbursts from Mr. Straight Talk, see here, here, here, here, here and here).
2) Once again, let me thank the Democratic caucus-goers of Iowa for preventing that man from becoming president.

On a more substantive note, when did left-of-center bloggers get such a tin ear? The normally reliable Ed Kilgore, Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias all think this is overblown or going to play in Democrats’ favor. But they’re confusing tough rhetoric with smart politics. When Republicans cross the line, it’s usually with a demagogic appeal to the white, moderate-to-conservative majority — an ugly but all-too-effective electoral strategy. But rather than playing to the majority, Dean attacked it, playing right into the conservative meta-narrative that Democrats are out-of-touch liberal secularists.

Drum’s argument is that the controversy will force the press to cover the substance of Dean’s claim:

[G]uess what happens after the initial firestorm has died out? With news hook in hand, reporters will get to work. Does James Dobson control the agenda of the Republican party? Are Republicans overwhelmingly white? Do party leaders work against the interests of the working class? This is exactly where we’d like the focus to be: on our issues, not theirs. After all, the answers to these questions are inevitably going to be bad for the Republican party.

I like Kevin, but this is completely wrong. First of all, where is the in-depth coverage? I haven’t seen anything like this and I consume a lot of political news. 99% of the people who hear about Dean’s comments will never see a followup story. One segment on “Inside Politics” did say that most Republicans (and a majority of Democrats) are white Christians, but that’s not exactly news, nor is it going to move voters.

And even if the press blared headlines that the GOP really is made up of white Christians, it won’t help Democrats because Americans don’t like to think in group-oriented terms about politics. To do so is contrary to all our individualist norms. To illustrate this point, take Dean’s argument to its logical extreme — should people support the Democratic Party just because it has lots of minority supporters? I think most people would dismiss this idea out of hand (especially whites). If anything, making race and religion salient may make white Christians less likely to support Democrats, not more so. The fact that Howard Dean doesn’t understand this shows why he is not the man to rebuild the Democratic Party.

I’ve been wondering why more people have been hitting my post about the ugly racial history of Senator George Allen (R-VA). The reason, it seems, is that the resolution Allen is sponsoring to apologize for the Senate’s failure to pass anti-lynching legislation is about to reach the floor.

Unlike other media outlets, the Washington Post article on the resolution puts Allen’s sponsorship of the bill in the context of his political history:

”The apology is long overdue,” said Senator George Allen, Republican of Virginia, who is sponsoring the resolution with Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. ”Our history does include times when we failed to protect individual freedom and rights.”

The Senate’s action is occurring amid a series of conciliatory efforts nationwide that include the reopening of investigations and prosecutions in Mississippi. Advocates say the vote would mark the first time Congress has apologized for the nation’s treatment of African-Americans.

Allen’s involvement could help mend his rift with black Virginians who criticized him for hanging a noose outside his law office, displaying a Confederate flag in his home, and proclaiming a Confederate History Month while governor.

The question that’s omitted, however, is whether this resolution — commendable as it may be — is enough to make up for his past history if/when he runs for president. My answer is no.

Update 6/14: It passed on a voice vote — apparently a handful of senators didn’t want to go on record supporting it. What a sad commentary on how far we have to go in this country.

Also, it’s worth noting that the New York Times joined the Post in pointing out the political incentives for Allen to push the resolution in its story today:

Others described the resolution as an act of expediency for Mr. Allen, who is a likely presidential candidate and who has been criticized for displaying a Confederate flag at his home and a noose in his law office. Mr. Allen said that they were part of collections of flags and Western paraphernalia and that he was motivated not by politics, but by a plea by Dick Gregory, the civil rights advocate, who wrote him a letter urging him not to “choose to do nothing.”

The second half of today’s “Meet the Press” featured a typically inane pundit “roundtable.” The lowlight came when Tim Russert asked John Harwood of the Wall Street Journal and David Broder of the Washington Post about Hillary Clinton’s criticism of press coverage of the Bush administration. Let’s start with Russert’s first question and Harwood’s response:

RUSSERT: Here’s one thing she did say about the press corps, John Harwood: “Abetting the Republicans, [Senator Clinton] said in some of her sharpest language, is a Washington press corps that has become a pale imitation of the Watergate-era reporters who are being celebrated this month” among “the identification of the anonymous Washington Post source, Deep Throat. `The press is missing in action, with all due respect. Where are the investigative reporters today? Why aren’t they asking the hard questions? It’s shocking when you see how easily they fold in the media today. They don’t stand their ground. If they’re criticized by the White House, they just fall apart. I mean, come on, toughen up, guys, it’s only our Constitution and country at stake. Let’s get some spine.’”

HARWOOD: I’m sure glad she added “with all due respect” to that statement. Look, people in politics, when their point of view is not prevailing, tend to get frustrated with the messenger. I don’t think anybody can say that throughout the 2004 campaign that the faults of the Bush administration were not front and center in that campaign, even the issue that we’ve been talking about recently, the Downing Street memo, the whole issue about whether intelligence was fixed to support the Iraq War. That was substantially what the 2004 campaign was about: Did we rush to war? That was part of John Kerry’s argument. So the flaws of the administration, its penchant for trying to consolidate power, its penchant for secrecy in some ways is something that’s been out in front of the American people, but Democrats have been on the short side.

They lost the 2004 election because of the national security issue. But here’s the promise in what we’ve seen in David Broder’s Washington Post-ABC poll, some other developments lately: Some of the air is coming out of the tire on this administration on Iraq. People are getting anxious. They don’t know what the future is going to hold. They don’t know how positive events really are. Dick Cheney says the insurgency is in its last throes. The American people are coming to question that right now.

Notice what’s missing from Harwood’s response. There are no specifics responding to Clinton’s complaint about coverage of the Bush White House. He simply notes that John Kerry criticized the President and lost, as if Kerry’s defeat proves Clinton wrong. In fact, Harwood goes so far as to suggest that press coverage is the “messenger” of the fact that Democrats are losing elections — as pure a distillation of the media’s deference to those in power as I’ve ever seen.

In a followup, Broder — unlike Harwood — actually addressed Clinton’s critique, but his response is a joke:

RUSSERT: David Broder, the press corps–was it more tenacious during Watergate, more tenacious against Bill Clinton, or is it people seeing things through their ideological prism–that when you’re going after Clinton it’s good, going against Bush bad, and vice versa?

BRODER: The shortsightedness of Mrs. Clinton’s complaint is illustrated by this morning’s Washington Post. The front-page story on another memo, this one to Tony Blair’s government, about the lack of planning in our government for the postwar period in Iraq. Who does she think is doing this work if not investigative reporters? Give us a break.

A single counter-example is not exactly a convincing argument. And it’s ironic that Broder is touting the Post’s coverage of the second memo given that the Post’s ombudsman wrote that he was “amazed that The Post took almost two weeks to follow up on the [London Sunday] Times report” about the Downing Street memo.

More generally, this little exchange is a classic example of how a profession closes ranks to defend itself. The reality is that the press corps was missing in action from Sept. 11, 2001 until late 2003, and only took a hard look at the White House when criticism from Democratic presidential candidates gave them cover. And it’s indisputable that this administration continues to receive far better treatment than its predecessor despite pathological levels of policy dishonesty and secrecy. But to acknowledge that Clinton is right would make them and their profession look bad (and give false credence to claims of liberal bias), so instead Harwood and Broder just bluster away. What an embarrassment.

Here’s a roundup of the latest liberal nonsense in the news.

First, James Taranto notes that Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) compared the US war in Iraq to the Holocaust:

Powerful lawmaker Charlie Rangel has provoked the ire of the Anti-Defamation League by likening U.S. military action in Iraq to the Holocaust of World War II.

The Iraq war “is the biggest fraud ever committed on the people of this country. … This is just as bad as the 6 million Jews being killed,” the 74-year-old Harlem Democrat insisted during a Monday radio appearance on the WWRL-AM morning show with
Steve Malzberg and Karen Hunter. “The whole world knew and they were quiet about it because it wasn’t their ox being gored.”

When interviewer Malzberg challenged Rangel’s analogy, the congressman replied: “I am saying that people’s silence when they know things terrible are happening is the same thing as the Holocaust.”

Whatever you think about the war in Iraq — which is morally ambiguous on a number of levels — it bears no comparison to the Holocaust. The comparison is obscene.

Next, we have Bob Kuttner of the American Prospect, who wrote the following about John Kerry in the Boston Globe:

John Kerry may well give [the presidency] another shot, as the candidate who came up just one state short in 2004, perhaps due to deliberately contrived long lines that held down Democratic turnout in Ohio.

Note the carefully hedged phrasing, which allows Kuttner to suggest that the long lines in Ohio were a) “deliberately contrived” and b) prevented Kerry from winning, even though there’s no convincing evidence to support either charge. Here’s what the Washington Post found:

Electoral problems prevented many thousands of Ohioans from voting on Nov. 2. In Columbus, bipartisan estimates say that 5,000 to 15,000 frustrated voters turned away without casting ballots. It is unlikely that such “lost” voters would have changed the election result — Ohio tipped to President Bush by a 118,000-vote margin and cemented his electoral college majority.

And even the Conyers report on voting in Ohio (PDF) states that “Whether the cumulative effect of these [alleged] legal violations would have altered the actual
outcome is not known at this time.” Absent stronger evidence, Kuttner is just casting aspersions.

Finally, there’s Jeffrey Dubner of Kuttner’s American Prospect, who purports to read Trent Lott’s mind on Tapped (the magazine’s weblog):

[T]he entire Republican caucus has cast a total of two votes against George W. Bush’s nominees: Lincoln Chafee’s vote last week against Priscilla Owen, and Trent Lott’s vote against Roger Gregory, a Bill Clinton nominee who Bush renominated as a show of pre–September 11 good will and who was supported by John Warner and George Allen. (And Lott’s vote, it would seem, was just to resist the integration of the Fourth Circuit, which had never seen an African American judge; Republicans blocked four separate African American nominees during Clinton’s presidency.)

“[I]t would seem” that Lott opposed Gregory “just to resist the integration of the Fourth Circuit”? Lott has an ugly history on race and was the only senator who voted no on Gregory, but that doesn’t excuse this kind of faux-psychological speculation. Without supporting evidence, it’s just a blatant accusation of racism against Lott for opposing a black nominee — the same kind of reductionism that Republicans use when attacking Democrats as bigots for opposing minority or religiously conservative judicial nominees.

A MoveOn PAC email referenced an unbelievable quote from Condoleezza Rice’s speech at the American Embassy in Baghdad on May 15:

You see, this war came to us, not the other way around. The United States of America, when it was attacked on September 11th, realized that we lived in a world where (inaudible) gather and that we lived in a world in which we had to have a different kind of Middle East if we were ever going to have a permanent peace. It just could not continue to be a Middle East in which dictators like Saddam Hussein paraded around, lived in great palaces, and yet tortured and oppressed and just made mincemeat of this wonderful infrastructure here in Iraq. We just couldn’t let that stand — a man who had been a danger to this region for his entire reign.

As CNN reported with droll understatement:

Although the U.S. decision to launch the war in 2003 was condemned in many nations and the original justification — Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction — turned out to be based on flawed intelligence, Rice said, “This war came to us, no the other way around.”

Rice’s statement is an especially brazen combination of two of the administration’s rhetorical strategies: the attempt to link Iraq and Sept. 11 in the public’s mind, and the post-war revisions of the original rationale for the war, which centered on the threat to America from Saddam’s alleged WMDs. (See the Iraq chapters in All the President’s Spin for more.)

Writing in the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson revisits the news media’s addiction to missing white women:

Someday historians will look back at America in the decade bracketing the turn of the 21st century and identify the era’s major themes: Religious fundamentalism. Terrorism. War in Iraq. Economic dislocation. Bioengineering. Information technology. Nuclear proliferation. Globalization. The rise of superpower China. And, of course, Damsels in Distress.

Every few weeks, this stressed-out nation with more problems to worry about than hours in the day finds time to become obsessed with the saga — it’s always a “saga,” never just a story — of a damsel in distress. Natalee Holloway, the student who disappeared while on a class trip to the Caribbean island of Aruba, is the latest in what seems an endless series.

Robinson notes that the type of women who are featured tend to fit a certain profile:

of course the damsels have much in common besides being female. You probably have some idea of where I’m headed here.

A damsel must be white. This requirement is nonnegotiable. It helps if her frame is of dimensions that breathless cable television reporters can credibly describe as “petite,” and it also helps if she’s the kind of woman who wouldn’t really mind being called “petite,” a woman with a good deal of princess in her personality. She must be attractive — also nonnegotiable. Her economic status should be middle class or higher, but an exception can be made in the case of wartime (see: Lynch).

Put all this together, and you get 24-7 coverage. The disappearance of a man, or of a woman of color, can generate a brief flurry, but never the full damsel treatment.

Why does this happen? Marginal viewers! Young white women are the most attractive demographic group for advertisers, and especially common among marginal viewers — the infrequent viewers whom news shows hope to attract. For the full analysis from Jay Hamilton’s All the News that’s Fit to Sell, see this post.

You can apply a similar analysis to the widely mocked New York Times editorial about how people making $100,000-$200,000 are getting screwed by the Bush tax cuts.

The sociological analysis of the editorial (offered, oddly enough, by economist Brad DeLong) is that Times reporters and the people they know are in that income range. But the economists’ answer might be that a substantial percentage of the affluent consumers who subscribe to the Times — or whom the newspaper would like to attract — are in that income bracket. The median household income of a Times subscriber is $135,000. The idea that the Grey Lady is bowing to capitalist incentives is a little crass — but it might just be true.

Matt Taibbi has written an astonishingly scathing review of Thomas Friedman’s new book The World is Flat — here’s an excerpt:

Thomas
Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws
up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has
an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of
rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary
bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say
some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed,
every single time. He never misses.

On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring
kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the
equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete
with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country.
It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes
back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource
the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we’re not
in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we’re not in Kansas anymore.) That’s the whole plot right there.
If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that’s all there is.

If you like the vitriolic review genre, read the whole thing — it’s up there with Taibbi on Newsweek and Anthony Lane on Revenge of the Sith.

David Bianculli, the New York Daily News TV critic who served as the substitute “Fresh Air” host today, gave this introduction today to the re-broadcast of an old interview with Dave Chapelle:

The third season of his Comedy Central series, called “Chapelle Show,” was scheduled to start last month. But Chapelle pulled a vanishing act, retreating to South Africa and forcing the network to substitute other programming. There were rumors of drug abuse, mental instability, even a conversion to Islam. But Chapelle denied all of that in Time Magazine, and resurfaced last week at two comedy clubs in Los Angeles, dropping in unannounced to perform for delighted crowds.

First, the implicit suggestion that converting to Islam is worse than drug abuse and mental instability is, shall we say, highly questionable. But more importantly, Chappelle didn’t deny converting to Islam in Time Magazine — here’s what Christopher John Farley wrote:

This is Chappelle’s second trip to South Africa. He first came to Durban, and visited Salim, in 2000. Chappelle won’t tell me exactly how he met Salim but describes him as a family friend. A soft-spoken Muslim, Salim seems also to be something of a sounding board to Chappelle, who converted to Islam several years ago.

How hard is it to get this kind of stuff right?