Month: November 2011
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New at CJR: Fact-checking versus strategy
My new post at CJR analyzes how media organizations in New Hampshire and at the national level have covered recent misleading ads by Rick Perry and Mitt Romney: In Sunday’s Boston Globe, reporter Michael Levenson warned of a coming “year of mudslinging.” This “rough, negative, and confusing advertising onslaught,” as Levenson calls it, is foreshadowed
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New at CJR: Covering a “national campaign” in NH
I’m starting a regular gig as a New Hampshire campaign correspondent for Columbia Journalism Review. My first post, which focuses on the challenges of covering an increasingly national campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, is now online — here’s an excerpt: At one time, the hope was that people in early states would have a
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The attack on election forecasting straw men
In recent days, journalists, bloggers, and commentators have reared up to bash a fictitious conventional wisdom about election forecasting. The premise for many of these statements is that political scientists believe that campaigns and other non-economic factors don’t matter in presidential elections. For instance, The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky describes “the political-science theory of presidential
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Forecasting 2012: How much does ideology matter?
By Brendan Nyhan and Jacob Montgomery One year in advance of the 2012 election, New York Times blogger Nate Silver published a presidential forecasting model. The model includes measures of presidential approval and economic performance — standard variables in election forecasting models — as well as a novel measure of challenger ideology that appears to