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New at CJR: Forget the debates
My new post at CJR makes the case that the media are devoting too much attention to the debates in the Republican primary race. The super PAC-funded assault on Mitt Romney in South Carolina is far more likely to change the dynamics of the race: [I]f the debates are unlikely to sway voters, is there
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New at CJR: The New Hampshire expectations game
I have a new post up at CJR on the problems with journalists setting arbitrary expectations for candidate performance in presidential primaries. Here’s the lede: After finishing the Iowa caucus in a virtual tie with former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney is in a commanding position as the Republican primary campaign heads toward next
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New at CJR: The post-Iowa challenge
I have a new post up at CJR on the need for more self-awareness among political reporters about their role in creating an Iowa bounce. Here’s how it begins: Over the last week, much of the nation’s political press corps has headed to Iowa to cover the Republican presidential campaign. The saturation coverage is already
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Most-read posts of 2011
Since everyone is doing year-end lists, here are my ten most-read posts of 2011. Interestingly, two are posts that still draw significant traffic through links and Google: 1. The disappearing Tax Foundation blog post (5/16/11) 2. The problems with the Groseclose/Milyo study of media bias (12/22/05) 3. Forecasting 2012: How much does ideology matter? (11/10/11)
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New at CJR: The problems with news pegs
My new post at CJR analyzes how reporters’ dependence on news pegs is hampering coverage of Newt Gingrich in New Hampshire: Given that Gingrich has seemingly come out of nowhere to mount the first serious challenge to Mitt Romney’s frontrunner status, it seemed appropriate to expect that he would receive newfound media scrutiny. But at
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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
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Perry’s “16th century” gaffe (with audio)
I attended the post-debate fraternity event last night where Texas governor Rick Perry mistakenly placed the American Revolution in the 16th century: “Our Founding Fathers never meant for Washington, D.C. to be the fount of all wisdom. As a matter of fact they were very much afraid if that because they’d just had this experience