Month: July 2010
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LA Times goes “he said,” “she said” on iPhone “curse”
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
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Twitter roundup
(People reading in RSS — if you can’t see the widget above, please click through to the post or to my Twitter feed.)
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Ad hoc narratives about structural outcomes
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
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ABC News webcast interview on corrections research
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.
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Cornyn’s imaginary Bush renaissance
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
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Proliferating racial/religious attacks on Obama
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
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The bogus presidential “salesman” narrative
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.”