Brendan Nyhan

My new column describes the innovations in data-based storytelling that are emerging from the sportswriters for ESPN’s Grantland site and suggests what lessons they might suggest for political and policy coverage. Here’s how it begins:

We’re in a boom time for analytical Web journalism that uses data to make politics and policy compelling to readers. Since parting ways with The New York Times, Nate Silver has been hiring staff in preparation for launching an expanded FiveThirtyEight site under the Disney corporate umbrella. At Silver’s former home, meanwhile, David Leonhardt is heading up a new data-focused project that will cover economics, politics, sports, and more. And just this morning, Wonkblog creator Ezra Klein announced that he is leaving The Washington Post for what is likely to be a large-scale independent venture.

Even though it doesn’t cover politics and policy, there’s another publication that belongs in this discussion: Grantland, the ESPN-owned sports and pop culture site. Like Wonkblog and FiveThirtyEight, Grantland is a largely independent satellite of a larger media brand; it was spun off from ESPN under the direction of editor Bill Simmons and given significant creative freedom to experiment with format and content. And though the site may be best known for its long, writerly features (including a spectacularly ill-conceived story on the inventor of a new golf putter last week), its most notable contribution to the visual grammar of the Internet may come from the young contributors to its sports coverage, who are developing creative ways to combine stats-based analysis, commentary, and illustrative visual examples. While this approach is a natural fit for sports coverage, it offers lessons for coverage of politics and policy as well.

For more, read the whole thing.

My new CJR column explains why the Chris Christie bridge scandal is likely to be a significant news story and how it could damage him in the GOP invisible primary. Here’s how it begins:

Would Chris Christie’s administration block traffic lanes from Fort Lee, NJ, onto the George Washington Bridge to retaliate against its Democratic mayor for endorsing Christie’s opponent? Back in December, I dubbed these seemingly far-fetched allegations a conspiracy theory—but as I said at the time, sometimes conspiracy theories are true! Pundits and critics like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow were ahead of the facts, but today’s revelation—reported most compellingly in the Bergen County Record and The Wall Street Journal—of a series of emails between top Christie aides and administration officials cartoonishly plotting to create “traffic problems in Fort Lee” will turn this apparent abuse of power into a major scandal.

For more, read the whole thing.

My new CJR column examines how the media often confuses centrism with objectivity in its coverage of budget politics, which frequently suggests that deficit reduction is a value-neutral priority that should take precedence over other possible objectives:

How should the United States choose among the difficult tradeoffs it faces in setting the federal budget? There’s no one correct answer, but you wouldn’t know it from coverage of the budget deal between Senator Patty Murray and Rep. Paul Ryan, which passed the Senate last night and will soon be signed into law.

Under the norm of objectivity that dominates mainstream political journalism in the United States, reporters are supposed to avoid endorsing competing political viewpoints or proposals. In practice, however, journalists often treat centrist policy priorities—especially on fiscal policy—as value-neutral.

Read the whole thing for more.

My new CJR column is on the media’s tendency to construct simplistic stories about President Obama’s political standing. Here’s how it begins:

Journalists rightly seek to tell compelling stories, which can bring abstract or dry topics to life, but the need to create a compelling narrative can be dangerous in politics. As we’ve seen in recent weeks, the focus on storytelling over analytical precision pulls the media toward overstated claims, false binary choices, and simplified narratives, especially when it comes to the presidency.
The most recent example is the current cycle of media overreaction to Barack Obama’s difficulties…

Read the whole thing for more.

My new column at CJR examines the claim that members of Congress are so divided because they don’t spend time together and shows how an excellent story in the Boston Globe illustrates the problems with that hypothesis. Here’s how it begins:

Why can’t members of Congress just get along? Critics of polarization often suggest that a key reason for the decline of bipartisanship is the lack of social connections across party lines. If legislators could get to know each other as people, these accounts suggest, they would be able to put aside their disagreements and work together.

It’s an attractive idea—but one that has little empirical support.

Read the whole thing for more.

David Gergen is the prototypical Washington wise man, an experienced operative who has served under four presidents and was famously brought into the Clinton White House to provide more experienced leadership. When he’s not working in the White House, though, he often makes the rounds as a pundit – and you’ll never guess how he thinks President Obama should solve his problems!

As Mark Halperin noted on Twitter, Gergen called this week for the administration to hire a “heavyweight” to get his agenda moving in Congress:

David Gergen, who has worked for both Republican and Democratic presidents, said the president needs to bring in a Washington “heavyweight” who is schooled in moving an agenda through the capital.

It’s advice he’s repeated again and again over the years. In Gergen-land, there’s no political problem that can’t be solved by getting more “heavyweights” involved – check out this (no doubt partial) list from a quick Nexis search:

“What good president have done — most effective presidents have done have then supplemented those — that inner circle with heavyweights whom they can look to.” (Diane Rehm Show 11/4/13)

“If we had had a commission like this [the Iraq Study Group], of heavyweights, who had spoken up so publicly and forcefully, when Lyndon Johnson was president … the Vietnam War would have ended much earlier.” (Associated Press, 12/8/06)

“I still think [President Obama] needs heavyweights from the business community.” (CNN, 10/22/10)

“The current shuffle is coming extremely late for a recovery — too late, probably — and so far, the administration has not brought in any outside heavyweights.” (New York Times, 4/23/06)

There’s a weird sort of Green Lantern-ism to Gergen’s belief that “heavyweights” can overcome the structural obstacles presidents face to achieving their objectives. Staff are easy to blame, of course, when things go poorly for an administration, but there’s little evidence to support the notion that they can, say, magically push Obama’s agenda through Congress.

(The problem of David Gergen advising presidents to hire him or people like him is closely related to the expert service problem that creates perverse incentives in fields like auto repair, dentistry, and medicine.)

My new CJR column is on how media organizations can do a better job correcting their own mistakes. Here’s how it begins:

The most controversial media error in recent months came in a 60 Minutes report by Lara Logan about the attack on the US mission in Benghazi, which ran for more than 15 minutes on Oct. 27. Logan’s story featured claims by a security officer that were later shown to contradict his statement to the FBI. After the officer’s claims came under increasing scrutiny, Logan apologized for her error on CBS This Morning on Nov. 8 and acknowledged it had been a mistake to include the officer’s account in a brief segment at the end of 60 Minutes on Nov. 10.

….What hasn’t yet been widely appreciated, however, is the way that CBS and 60 Minutes have compounded the original mistake by scrubbing their digital files of the retracted segment. A press release issued yesterday by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) called the news organization’s handling of the error “a case study in how not to correct an inaccurate report in the digital age.”

I’ve been remiss in updating this blog – here are my three most recent CJR columns:

The extrapolation fallacy (11/21)

Is the sky falling for Obamacare?

You might think so from reading the press these days. On Monday, National Journal published a piece by Josh Kraushaar with the headline “Why Obamacare Is On Life Support” and a subhed that predicted “Democrats may begin calling for repeal if the law’s problems don’t get resolved soon.” CBS News’s Jake Miller also asked “Is the Affordable Care Act in serious jeopardy?” and Politico’s Todd Purdum went even further, warning of “Obamacare’s threat to liberalism.”

It’s true, of course, that the rollout of the new insurance exchanges has gone much more poorly than the administration expected, raising concerns among members of Congress, including Democrats who normally back Obama. The issue has become sufficiently damaging that 39 vulnerable House Democrats even voted in favor of a GOP healthcare bill. But the legislation has no chance of becoming law, which allowed those Democrats to cast a free vote that distanced themselves from the current controversy without actually undermining their party’s policy objectives.

Journalists are extrapolating wildly from this starting point, imagining an unfolding political catastrophe that somehow induces Democrats in Congress to override a presidential veto and repeal their party’s signature domestic policy achievement of the last 30 or more years.

Factchecking goes local in New York (11/11)

With the trio of PolitiFact, Factcheck.org, and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog now well-established, the factchecking space might seem crowded, but a new entrant is poised to take the movement in an important, and largely uncharted, direction. The site, TruePolitics, which has been in a privately-funded pilot phase since early September, plans to scrutinize the accuracy of statements made by politicians in the New York City metro area, including Connecticut and New Jersey, starting early next year. Though PolitiFact operates an affiliate network of state-based sites run by partner media organizations, TruePolitics would be the first major factchecking website in the U.S. with a state and local focus—a promising development given the likelihood that state and local politicians will be more responsive to media scrutiny.

The failure to factcheck ‘You can keep it’ (10/30)

With the government shutdown over, the political media is devoting more attention to problems with the Obamacare rollout—most glaringly, the errors and technical failures confronting consumers who try to shop for coverage on the new insurance exchange websites. In the last few days, however, GOP criticism and media coverage has come to focus on a different concern: the termination notices that many consumers enrolled in health insurance plans purchased on the individual market are receiving, often accompanied by offers to buy new insurance at a substantially higher price.

These notices contradict President Obama’s oft-stated promise that Americans who like their healthcare plan would be able to keep it as reform was implemented. Still, they should come as no surprise — this outcome was anticipated by health policy experts both within and outside the administration. Unfortunately, most media coverage before this week did not explain how the process was likely to play out or hold the president accountable for making promises he could never keep.

Jason Reifler and I released a New America Foundation report today titled “Which Corrections Work? Research results and practice recommendations.” Here’s the executive summary:

Social science research has found that misinformation about politics and other controversial issues is often very difficult to correct. However, all corrections are not necessarily equal— some approaches to presenting corrective information may be more persuasive than others. In this report, we summarize new research in the field and present recommendations for journalists, educators, and civil society groups who hope to counter the influence of false or misleading claims.

The key challenge in countering misperceptions is to understand the psychology of belief— why people might believe something that is not true and reject or ignore corrective information contradicting that belief. If people are sufficiently motivated to believe in a claim, of course, it may be impossible to change their minds. In other cases, however, different approaches to presenting corrective information may be more effective. This report focuses on three areas in which corrections often fail to capitalize on what is known about how people process information: using non-credible or unpersuasive sources, failing to displace inaccurate causal understandings of an event or outcome; and trying to negate false claims rather than affirm correct ones.

I summarized our findings for Columbia Journalism Review as well. Here’s the introduction to my column on our findings:

Misperceptions, like zombies, are difficult to kill. A recent Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, for instance, found that the “death panel” myth is still believed by a substantial portion of the American public more than four years after the term was first coined by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

What can journalists do? There is reason for concern that artificially balanced coverage may misinform the public about the state of the available evidence, but trying to set the record straight isn’t always effective either. In fact, research I have conducted with the University of Exeter’s Jason Reifler and Duke University’s Peter Ubel concludes that corrective information about controversial issues like “death panels” is often unpersuasive to the most susceptible ideological group and sometimes makes the problem worse—a phenomenon known as the backfire effect. This research inspired us to start to develop a set of best practices for journalists. In a New America Foundation report published last year, Reifler and I presented a series of recommendations based on social science research to help journalists counter misinformation more effectively.

In a follow-up New America Foundation report published today, Reifler and I summarize the results of a series of experiments conducted in late 2012 and early 2013 that put several of our previous recommendations to the test.

I recently wrote a column for Columbia Journalism Review based on my field experiment with Jason Reifler testing the effectiveness of fact-checking on state legislators. Here’s how it begins:

Factcheckers often struggle to change the minds of skeptical voters. But what effect do they have on the politicians under scrutiny? Can the threat of being factchecked help keep politicians honest?

To answer this question, my co-author Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter and I conducted a field experiment during the final months of the 2012 campaign. We sent letters to hundreds of state legislators in the states where PolitiFact has an affiliate warning of the potential electoral and reputational consequences of negative factchecks. The results of our study, which we announced this week in a Politico op-ed and New America Foundation report, were striking: lawmakers who were sent the letter about the threat posed by factchecking were significantly less likely to have their statements publicly questioned as inaccurate by factcheckers or other sources than those who were not.

Our findings suggest that the presence of factcheckers creates a watchdog effect, helping to constrain politicians by increasing the costs of inaccuracy. But they also have implications for how factchecking outlets and the funders who support them allocate their resources. We believe factcheckers should broaden their focus beyond the presidential campaigns and national political figures who now receive the overwhelming majority of their attention, especially during elections.