Uncategorized
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New Medium: A weak president can still be dangerous
From my new column at Medium: Just as physicists spend decades seeking to resolve the seeming paradox that a photon is both a wave and a particle, observers of U.S. politics continue to struggle with the reality that Donald Trump is both an exceptionally weak president and an authoritarian threat. Since 2017, many commentators have
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New Medium: A politician’s authenticity doesn’t matter
From my new Medium column: With the 2020 presidential campaign officially underway, the worst excesses of political reporting are once again rearing their ugly heads — most notably, the media’s preoccupation with candidates’ authenticity, an obsession that has marred so many recent presidential campaigns. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand became the latest victim of the authenticity police
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New Medium: Why fears of fake news are overhyped
From my new column: After the shock of the 2016 presidential election, many Americans found psychological refuge in a simple explanation for why Donald Trump won: “fake news.” False or misleading information published by dubious for-profit websites had spread widely on Facebook, reaching millions of people in the final months of the campaign. This development
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New report on fake news and misinformation in 2018
From my new report with Andy Guess, Ben Lyons, Jacob Montgomery, and Jason Reifler: Concern has grown since the 2016 presidential election about the prevalence of misinformation in American politics and the ways social media has potentially exacerbated its reach and influence. In this report, we assess the quality and quantity of information flows during
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New column: How technologists can counter misinfo
From my new column co-authored with Patrick Ball: Since “fake news” rose to prominence during and after the 2016 election, the United States and countries around the world have struggled to determine how to most effectively address political misinformation. Though critics’ worst fears about the influence of online misinformation are likely overstated, false or misleading
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New Bright Line Watch reports
We published two new reports today at Bright Line Watch: –Wave 7 Report – new expert and public ratings of the state of U.S. democracy in October 2018 –Party, policy, democracy and candidate choice in U.S. elections – a new study estimating the effects of candidate support for democratic principles on vote choice
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New Medium: The Trump backlash on immigration
From my new column: Intweets and campaign rallies in recent days, President Trump has returned to his signature cause of immigration, inveighing against drug traffickers and a caravan of immigrants. Trump’s strategy makes perfect sense politically. He hopes to prod the Republican base to turn out in the midterms in November. One of the most
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New Monkey Cage: Court legitimacy post-Kavanaugh
From my new Monkey Cage post on the potential consequences of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination for public attitudes toward the Supreme Court: Could Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination undermine the public standing of the Supreme Court? Observers such as the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein think so. “Every time [Chief Justice John] Roberts would lean on Kavanaugh to construct a
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Document Journal essay on information overload
My 2017 essay for Document Journal on information overload is now online: Critics of democracy have long lamented that people know too little about politics, but today we have more news and information available to us than at any moment in history. I, for instance, start and end my days with Twitter: The ongoing stream
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New Bright Line Watch report on U.S. democracy
The key results from our July expert and public surveys: American democracy is continuing to erode. Our expert respondents perceive a consistent, ongoing decline in the overall quality of American democracy from 2015 (assessed retrospectively) to our first expert survey in February 2017 and over the five subsequent surveys we have conducted since then. Public