Brendan Nyhan

In the long and depressing history of “he said,” “she said” reporting, there may never have been an article more inane than the LA Times story last week titled “Could Apple’s iPhone 4 be cursed?” The article took the premise of a curse so seriously that the reporters even interviewed a numerologist:

The string of woes have been so striking that some have sought alternative explanations, including the notion that the phone may simply be jinxed. One theory focuses on the number four.

In China, where the iPhone is manufactured, four is considered to be bad luck. That’s largely because the word for four is nearly identical to the word for death. Many buildings in Hong Kong do not have a fourth floor, and people try to avoid phone numbers and license plates with “4” in them.

Device manufacturers such as Canon Inc. and Nokia Corp., wary of the digit’s ominous significance, have been known to skip from 3 to 5 when assigning model numbers to their products. Apple, though, seemed uncowed by the superstition.

The number requires a degree of care and attention that Apple may not have heeded, according to numerologist Daniel Hardt of Indianapolis.

“If shortcuts are attempted, the whole thing falls apart,” Hardt said. “The 4 can also be karmic, having some overtones of a problem stemming from some past activity. It seems very likely to be the case that there is some karma at play in this situation that has caused the phone to not be as functional as it should be.”

Lydia Chen, associate director of the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, said she grew up “knowing that number 4 was something you avoided.”

“I would personally never say it’s the number 4 causing all of this,” she said. “Still, maybe people should avoid iPhone 13 when it gets here.”

At the very end of the article, the Times interviews a professor who puts these claims into context as “magical beliefs,” but the reporters present it in “he said,” “she said” format:

Phil Stevens, a professor at SUNY Buffalo who studies superstition, said the iPhone’s problems could be considered bad luck, a jinx, or even a curse — all versions of what he called “magical beliefs” that gain traction in tougher times, when reason often takes a back seat to fear and anxiety.

“A jinx is the idea that cosmic forces that surround us are somehow out of whack,” he said, whereas a curse requires that someone actually pronounce an imprecation.

“To say it’s cursed, you’d have to go back and find the person who cursed it,” he said. “Because who would do this?”

Maybe it’s cursed, maybe not — who knows? You’ll never see a better illustration of the absurdity of this sort of reporting. It’s an embarrassment to journalism.

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One of my favorite themes is the way journalists create narratives based on tactics, personality, or dramatic events that purport to “explain” political outcomes that are actually the result of more systematic factors (see, e.g., here, here, and here). I’ve also been writing a lot recently about how pundits and partisans on both sides tend to attribute the president’s failure to achieve his supporters’ goals to failures of tactics or willpower.

It’s clear that neither of these are new phenomena, but my focus is contemporary politics, so it was cool to see an example from the past. Barry Pump, a graduate student at the University of Washington, notes that Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate includes a closely related passage about the way that failure in the Senate was interpreted by journalists and the public:

Failing to understand the realities of Senate power, press and public thought a “Leader” was a leader, and therefore blamed the Leaders — particularly the “Majority Leader” — for the Senate’s failures. As White wrote: “A large part of the public has come to think that it is only the leaders … who somehow seem to stand, stubbornly and without reason, against that ‘action’ which the White House so often demands.’ And heaped atop blame was scorn. Many Washington journalists were liberals, eager for enactment of that liberal legislation which seemed so clearly desired not only by the President but by the bulk of the American people and impatient
with the Majority Leaders who, despite the fact that they were leading
a majority, somehow couldn’t get the legislation passed. Not
understanding the institutional realities, the journalists laid the
Leaders’ failure to personal inadequacies: incompetence, perhaps, or
timidity.

This passage highlights the limitations of the American political system. The number of veto points is so large, and their effects so poorly understood, that people resort to ad hoc narratives to explain outcomes that are largely a result of the structure of the system itself. In recent years, the best example of this dynamic is the filibuster, which creates a de facto requirement of a Senate supermajority. The resulting lack of legislative action frequently gives rise to narratives about a lack of new ideas or insufficient presidential willpower, but it’s really a structural problem.

I did an interview about my corrections research (co-authored with Jason Reifler) with ABC’s Ron Claiborne for the World News Tonight webcast series The Conversation — here’s the video and the accompanying article:

Can you admit it when you’re wrong? Do you believe new facts will help you change your opinion?

Turns out, probably not.

A growing body of research has found that we’re even more stubborn and steadfast than we realize, and this can have troubling implications for a democracy based on an educated society.

“This isn’t just about being educated or knowledgeable,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist who studies political misperceptions. “Those are often the people that are more resistant to information they don’t want to hear.”

You might believe you base your political views on hard facts, but in many cases, our voting behavior stems more from our beliefs.

Nyhan’s paper, titled “When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions,” found that when we encounter facts that contradict those beliefs, the facts are either ignored or twisted to support our positions. And it’s not limited to one political party — both liberals and conservatives share the same problem.

“There’s an idea out there that if we just give people the facts, they can make good decisions,” said Nyhan. “I think people can make good decisions, but just giving them the facts is not going to do it.”

What can be done about it? Nyhan has some ideas, which he shared with ABC’s Ron Claiborne in today’s Conversation.

So consider the facts, and watch today’s Conversation with an open mind.

During a C-SPAN interview taped Friday, National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman John Cornyn claimed “a lot of people are looking back with more fondness on President Bush’s administration” (video):

Cornyn also defended Democrats’ attempts to make former President Bush an issue in the 2010 election. “I think President Bush’s stock has gone up a lot since he left office,” Cornyn said, citing Bush’s response to Sept. 11. “I think a lot of people are looking back with more fondness on President Bush’s administration, and I think history will treat him well.”

While conservatives may be “looking back with more fondness on President Bush’s administration,” there’s no evidence of a general pro-Bush shift in public opinion. Here’s a chart showing the proportion of the public that reports having a favorable or positive opinion of Bush since January 2009:

The trendline is essentially flat. Given the state of the economy, for which many Americans hold Bush responsible*, I wouldn’t expect his ratings to improve any time soon.

* A June NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found (PDF) that 40% of Americans think Bush is “solely responsible” or “mainly responsible” for the state of the economy and an additional 46% think he is “only somewhat responsible.”

Update 7/19 12:59 PM: I see NBC’s First Read noted the lack of change in ratings of Bush in the NBC/WSJ poll this morning. I have also embedded a clip of Cornyn’s statement from Think Progress above.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

Jon Chait and Dave Weigel have posted excellent critiques of the way parts of the conservative movement (including Fox News) are using the flimsy New Black Panther Party pseudo-scandal to exploit white fears that President Obama favors blacks. What’s unusual about this, as Chait notes, is that conservatives had largely refrained from race-based attacks on Obama before this (with the notable exception of Rush Limbaugh). The widespread embrace of the NBPP allegations suggests a new and ugly turn in the effort to demonize Obama.

What’s less widely appreciated is the parallel to conservative efforts to suggest Obama is a Muslim, disloyal to this country, and/or trying to institute Islamic sharia law, which only have resonance as a result of similarly paranoid fears about the president (in this case, that he’s concealing his true beliefs).

Most recently, as Media Matters pointed out (here and here), the Washington Times published columns by Frank Gaffney and Jeffrey Kuhner claiming, respectively, that Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is “enabling efforts to insinuate” Shariah law in the US and that Obama is “a cultural Muslim whose sympathies lie with the Islamic world” and is “betraying the Jews.” These op-eds were even published with offensive “photo illustrations” showing Kagan in a turban and Obama with a crescent moon and star on his head:

While the Muslim-baiting of Obama hasn’t yet reached critical mass, look for this tactic to resurface. As the NBPP controversy shows, all it takes is one decision that can be misconstrued to activate people’s preconceptions about Obama.

Back in January, I predicted that the likely decline in President Obama’s political standing due to the state of the economy and an unfavorable political environment would spur the press to generate “elaborate narratives about how the character, personality, and tactics of the principals in the White House inevitably led them to their current predicament.”

The latest pundit to engage in this dubious exercise is Slate’s John Dickerson, who has written an article attributing the relatively weak support for Obama and his policies to a failure of salesmanship (via Mickey Kaus):

Death of a Salesman
A slew of new polls suggest Obama is not a great pitchman for his policies.

…Economists may say, yes, the economy is recovering… but the country says no… [A] slew of recent polls … suggest that the administration’s summer tour will do little to improve the president’s political fortunes and those of his party…

[W]hat’s so bad about these surveys is that they paint a very dark picture about the president’s ability to brighten the future. If Obama can’t improve things for Democrats, no one can. And as bad as the president’s numbers are, the Democrats in Congress are in even worse shape.

Candidate Obama used to joke about rays of sunshine coming in when he started to speak. Now he brings the clouds. He’s spent a great deal of time talking about the Recovery Act and health care reform, but the political fortunes of those programs are dismal, which suggests his ability to persuade and change minds is seriously damaged.

He has been trying to sell the success of his stimulus legislation for months in speeches, interviews, and events all over the country. In the CBS poll, only 23 percent think it has helped the economy. Only 13 percent think it has helped them personally. Despite all of his efforts, people are either ignoring him or tuning him out—or they can’t hear him over the bad economic news. Whatever the reason, the best argument Obama has for how he and Democrats have addressed the issue people care the most about is one that people aren’t buying.

The situation on health care is worse… The president has worked hard to improve the political fortunes of health care, but it hasn’t worked…

In reality, however, there’s no evidence that Obama has become any less effective as a salesman — as I’ve repeatedly pointed out over the years (e.g. here, here, here, and here), presidents can rarely generate significant shifts in public opinion in support of their domestic policy agenda. Obama’s failure to generate increased support for the stimulus and health care is not the least bit surprising, especially given the political environment in which he’s operating.

The larger problem with this analysis is that Dickerson is constructing a post hoc narrative about Obama’s poll numbers using the epistemology of journalism, which treats tactics as the dominant causal force in politics. Within that worldview, if Obama’s numbers used to be high and they are now low, the only logical conclusion is that “his ability to persuade and change minds is seriously damaged.” The idea that Obama’s numbers have declined across the board in large part due to the state of the economy is only briefly acknowledged (“or [the public] can’t hear [Obama] over the bad economic news”).

Update 7/15 11:08 AM: Jay Rosen flags another great example — a long Harris and VandeHei piece for Politico that puts far too much weight on Obama’s alleged political failings relative to the economic and political fundamentals:

The problem is that he and his West Wing turn out to be not especially good at politics, or communications — in other words, largely ineffective at the very things on which their campaign reputation was built. And the promises he made in two years of campaigning turn out to be much less appealing as actual policies…

Democrats privately complain that the real power center — the West Wing staff — isn’t nearly as impressive [as his Cabinet]. A common gripe on the Hill and on the lobbying corridor is that the communications team isn’t great at communicating, the speech-writing team isn’t great at speech writing (exemplified by Obama’s flaccid Oval Office speech last month on the BP spill and energy policy) and the political team often botches the politics…

Obama is swimming up Niagara until joblessness improves. But, even while Obama doesn’t directly control the economy, he has not been a disciplined or effective communicator about the state of the economy and his prescriptions for it. People will tolerate a weak economy if they feel there is an upward trajectory. But Obama has not managed to instill that confidence…

The article does contain a few brief acknowledgments that Obama faces a difficult economic situation (“Obama is swimming up Niagara until joblessness improves,” “No politician can escape the gravitational pull of bad employment numbers and economic figures in real-time”) but as with Dickerson, the implication is that the lack of popularity of his initiatives is largely the result of a failure of salesmanship.

Update 7/15 5:29 PM: CJR’s Greg Marx has a similar take on these two pieces.

[Cross-posted at Pollster.com]