Brendan Nyhan

Month: November 2014

  • New NYT: Bill Cosby’s sudden fall

    From my new Upshot column: How did Bill Cosby suddenly become radioactive? On Wednesday, the cable network TV Land pulled reruns of “The Cosby Show” from the air, a development that echoed decisions by NBC to drop a sitcom starring Mr. Cosby and Netflix’s announcement that it would postpone the release of his new comedy

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  • New NYT: Net neutrality and the bully pulpit

    From my new Upshot column: Imagine you are President Obama. You have about two more years in office, but your agenda is dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Congress that takes over in January. What do you do? One obvious strategy is to search for areas of common ground. However, the prospects for resolving existing

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  • New NYT: 2014 doesn’t tell us much about 2016

    From my new Upshot column: America has again embraced our long history of electoral overreaction. While it’s true that Republicans won a major victory at the polls, the results tell us far less about future elections than some commentary has suggested. In particular, the widespread Democratic losses weren’t a “repudiation” of Hillary Rodham Clinton (who

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  • New NYT: How exit polls can mislead

    From my new Upshot column: When the returns from tonight’s election start to become clear, the debate is likely to turn, as it so often does, to why the American people voted the way they did. That turns out to be a very difficult question to answer, however.

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  • New NYT: Don’t get fooled on Election Night

    From my new Upshot column: Election Day creates a vast information vacuum — millions of Americans (and hundreds of reporters) are trying to figure out the outcome of an event before it has been decided. With few useful indicators of what is actually happening at the polls, rumors and misinformation can run rampant. Here’s how

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