Brendan Nyhan

Jacob Weisberg, Slate’s editor, is the latest person to incorrectly suggest that the “Willie Horton” ad was aired by George H.W. Bush’s campaign:

In fact, the form, style, and content of the contemporary attack ad are a specifically conservative contribution to American politics. Republicans have developed most of the techniques, vocabulary, and symbolism at work in these spots over the last couple of decades. Some of the motifs go back to Nixon and Spiro Agnew, but you can trace most of the elements back to the presidential campaign Lee Atwater ran for George H.W. Bush in 1988, best remembered for the Willie Horton ad and the charge that Michael Dukakis was a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.”

The ad was actually aired by National Security Political Action Committee. Bush Sr. discussed Horton extensively on the campaign trail and aired an ad that criticized the Massachusetts furlough program, but it did not mention Horton. (There were also allegations of illegal coordination between Bush’s campaign and NSPAC that were not upheld by the FEC.)

The reason I know this is that, when I was working on Spinsanity, we caught Michael Moore adding a caption about Horton to Bush’s “Revolving Doors” ad in “Bowling for Columbine” to make it look like Bush ran the Horton ad. Ironically, even Moore’s caption describing Horton’s crimes was factually incorrect, so he corrected it in the DVD edition (though he refused to admit the more fundamental dishonesty of altering Bush’s ad).

ABCNews.com “breaking news” emails are fascinating little one sentence documents. I love this one from last year, which stretches the definition of “breaking news” to the, well, breaking point:

PUNXSUTAWNEY PHIL SEES HIS SHADOW, INDICATING SIX MORE WEEKS OF WINTER

But today’s is my favorite — it has to be the most bizarre ever:

EVANGELICAL LEADER TED HAGGARD ADMITS HE BOUGHT METH FROM MALE PROSTITUTE, DENIES GAY SEX CLAIM

Behold the grandeur of the national media — this post from TNR’s Jason Zengerle is worth reprinting in full:

Not to pick on CNN.com, but when it’s not hyperventilating about Kerry, it’s tackling tough stories like this one:

Would Alex P. Keaton back Fox on stem cells?

What about Teen Wolf?

Who says this election isn’t about the real issues?

PS: Maybe I should start marketing some “What would Alex P. Keaton do?” paraphernalia. For short, it’ll be “WWAPKD?”

At this point, everyone is used to President Bush mischaracterizing the remarks of his opponents, as he is doing with John Kerry’s botched joke. But will John “Straight Talk” McCain pay any reputational price for
this:

Senator Kerry owes an apology to the many thousands of Americans serving in Iraq, who answered their country’s call because they are patriots and not because of any deficiencies in their education. Americans from all backgrounds, well off and less fortunate, with high school diplomas and graduate degrees, take seriously their duty to our country, and risk their lives today to defend the rest of us in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

They all deserve our respect and deepest gratitude for their service. The suggestion that only the least educated Americans would agree to serve in the military and fight in Iraq, is an insult to every soldier serving in combat, and should deeply offend any American with an ounce of appreciation for what they suffer and risk so that the rest of us can sleep more comfortably at night. Without them, we wouldn’t live in a country where people securely possess all their God-given rights, including the right to express insensitive, ill-considered and uninformed remarks.

It’s more than a little ironic for McCain to get outraged about a joke given that he meant to tell this one back in 1998:

Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.

Unlike Kerry, Saint McCain received almost no negative coverage for it. The press needs to treating him like what he is — just another politician.

On Monday, I slammed Jennifer Steinhauer’s New York Times article on Nancy Pelosi for claiming the Democratic leader “favors alternative sentencing over prison construction, schools without prayer and death with taxes.” As I wrote, Pelosi’s objection is to organized prayer in school; students have every right to pray on their own. Similarly, she does not favor “death with taxes,” a phrase that is an absurd representation of her position on the estate tax, which affects approximately .5% of Americans who will die this year. Pelosi actually supports a plan that would reduce those affected to .3%.

The Times apparently realized that Steinhauer’s phrasing was unfair. As Bob Somerby and Media Matters point out, the print version of the article quoted above was altered online without any disclosure that it had been changed. The offending sentence now states that Pelosi “favors alternative sentencing over prison construction and opposes prayer in the schools.” And as Media Matters points out, the corrected version is also misleading. Pelosi opposes organized prayer in schools, not the act of prayer itself.

How hard is it to explain what John Kerry meant to say on Monday? Pretty easy. Even Chris Matthews can do it:

Let me read you two points again, if I have had to do this five times during this hour I will do it. Just so when we walk away from the show you will have the facts, you can interpret them as you will.

This is the Associated Press story of what happened yesterday at Pasadena City College. After several one liners saying at one point that President Bush lived in Texas but now lives in a state of denial. He said then, “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you work hard, you study hard, you do your homework, you make an effort to be smart you do well, if you do not, you get stuck in Iraq.”

The context is he’s trashing Bush for not having studied the region of the Middle East, not being prepared for what we face over there, the Sunnis and the Shias and everyone else fighting with each other, being stuck in that quicksand. That was his point.

Even National Review’s John Derbyshire admits Kerry wasn’t talking about the troops:

John Kerry is awful, and anything we can do further to degrade his political prospects is worth doing. But really, I saw a clip of him making the much-deplored remark, and it was obvious that the dimwit in Iraq that he referred to was George W. Bush, not the American soldier. It was a dumb joke badly delivered, but his meaning was plain. My pleasure in watching JK squirm is just as great as any other conservative’s, but something is owed to honesty. There’s a lot of fake outrage going round here.

Even former Republican leader Dick Armey is defending Kerry:

“Look, I think John Kerry’s right. He’s making a defense of himself. He’s saying, ‘Look, I was not maligning the troops. I was maligning the president of the United States.’ “

As Greg Sargent pointed out on The Horse’s Mouth (where I used to blog before quitting), the New York Times managed to print the prepared text of Kerry’s joke (“Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.”) but the Washington Post omitted it, giving the reader no frame other than Bush’s with which to understand Kerry’s remarks.

The problem is that studies show that misinformation is very hard to correct. Once incorrect factual information has been internalized by a reader, it continues to influence their beliefs even after you have told them it is wrong. And news coverage like the Post’s provides only a single frame with which to understand what Kerry was saying, creating the impression the White House wants in people’s minds. Is this going to be the next “invented the Internet”-level myth?

Update 11/1 4:48 PM: Media Matters has more:

In their coverage of the controversy surrounding Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) recent remarks on Iraq, numerous news outlets — including The Washington Post, USA Today, NBC, and CBS — have left out the full context for Kerry’s comment. Each of these outlets aired or quoted Kerry’s October 30 statement to a group of students in California that “if you study hard … you can do well,” but if “you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.” They then highlighted the subsequent attacks from President Bush and other Republicans — who have claimed that Kerry insulted U.S. troops and demanded that he apologize — while noting that Kerry claims it was a “botched joke” intended to specifically criticize Bush.

But in presenting the issue of whether Kerry intended to criticize the troops as a he-said/she-said conflict, these outlets omitted the evidence supporting Kerry’s account. Indeed, according to his staff, his prepared remarks demonstrate what he meant to say: “Do you know where you end up if you don’t study, if you aren’t smart, if you’re intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush.” Also overlooked is the fact that Kerry’s remark came after several one-liners, including one in which he personally accused Bush of “liv[ing] in a state of denial.” Furthermore, these outlets ignored entirely the remarks by several prominent Republicans — such as former Bush campaign chief strategist Matthew Dowd and former House Majority Leaders Dick Armey (R-TX) and Tom DeLay (R-TX) — conceding that Kerry did not intend to disparage American soldiers. Armey even acknowledged that Republicans were making political hay by “misconstru[ing]” what Kerry said.

Today’s story in the New York Times on the Durham district attorney case buries the lede, admitting late in the article that the case is a mess:

Mr. Nifong has been under attack for months by the defense and supporters of the lacrosse players for aggressively pursuing a case based almost entirely on the account of the accuser, which he acknowledges he has heard only from police reports and written statements, and not directly by speaking to her.

The flaws and gaps in the evidence have mounted. No DNA from the defendants was found on the dancer. At least one of the accused appears to have a strong alibi. A second woman hired to strip at the party has said she saw no evidence of an attack. And the array of photographs that led to the identification of the three defendants was not presented according to federal, state and local police guidelines for lineups.

This is what is called a “rowback”, a story that implicitly acknowledges mistakes in previous reporting without admitting those mistakes explicitly. The Times reporter, Duff Wilson, has become notorious for his prosecution-friendly reporting, which includes an August front-page story defending the case despite a tidal wave of evidence casting doubt on the accuser’s version of events. The story was embarrassing enough that Times insiders slammed it anonymously. Apparently, Wilson has had a change of heart. But you have to read to the 12th paragraph of a story buried inside the paper to find out. As Slate’s Jack Shafer has argued, we need a better mechanism to alert readers that previous coverage was flawed.

The Washington Post has a nice summary of how this election compares to other midterms in terms of presidential approval:

With his approval rating just below 40 percent, Bush approaches Election Day less popular than all but two presidents in the post-World War II era. Only Harry S. Truman in 1946 and Richard M. Nixon, who had resigned three months before the 1974 midterms, were lower. Even presidents going into midterm elections with higher approval ratings than Bush’s — Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, Ronald Reagan in 1982 and Bill Clinton in 1994 — have seen their parties suffer major losses.

The best any president has done with an approval rating below 50 percent was in 1978, when Jimmy Carter was at 49 percent. That year, Republicans picked up 15 House seats, exactly the number Democrats need this year to take control of that chamber.

Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus returns to a very important subject that I blogged about last week — whether Nancy Pelosi
will appoint Alcee Hastings as chair of the Intelligence Committee if the Democrats take the House:

If Democrats win control of the House next week, Nancy Pelosi’s first test as speaker will arrive long before the 110th Congress convenes. Her choice to head the House intelligence committee — unlike other House committees, this one is left entirely up to the party leadership — will speak volumes about whether a Speaker Pelosi will be able to resist a return to paint-by-numbers Democratic Party interest-group politics as usual.

Pelosi is in a box of her own devising. The panel’s ranking Democrat is her fellow Californian Jane Harman — smart and hardworking but also abrasive, ambitious and, in Pelosi’s estimation, insufficiently partisan on the committee. So Pelosi, once the intelligence panel’s ranking Democrat herself, has made clear that she doesn’t intend to name Harman to the chairmanship.

The wrong decision, in my view, but one that’s magnified by the unfortunate fact that next in line is Florida Rep. Alcee Hastings. In 1989, after being acquitted in a criminal trial, Hastings was stripped of his position as a federal judge — impeached by the House in which he now serves and convicted by the Senate — for conspiring to extort a $150,000 bribe in a case before him, repeatedly lying about it under oath and manufacturing evidence at his trial.

However, as one of my colleagues at Duke pointed out to me, these kinds of decisions aren’t strictly up to Pelosi; the Democratic caucus would decide how much power to give her as speaker, and how committee chairs are to be selected, after the election. If they pick up some marginal “red state” seats, the pressure from those members not to appoint Hastings will be very strong.

Washingtonpost.com’s Dan Froomkin flags two examples of one of my least favorite types of presidential journalism:

Richard Wolffe and Holly Bailey write for Newsweek: "President Bush looked pained. His hair was grayer than usual, his skin more washed out. The lines under his eyes were deeply scored. If that’s what victory looks like, you wouldn’t want to see defeat."

New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley writes: "The president, whose political identity is founded on an image of unwavering cowboy resolve, looked uncertain and chastened behind the lectern, at one moment staring downward and gnawing his lip in a rare tableau of weary anxiety."

The way Bush looks tell us very little. Every president looks exhausted by their sixth year in office. Moreover, interpreting how someone looks is completely subjective. The typical pattern is to use some visual cue to reinforce whatever narrative is dominant at the time. In this case, Bush’s ratings are down and his party is in trouble, so he’s portrayed as looking tired and chastened. When he’s winning, he’s described as confident, energetic, etc. In general, it’s a bankrupt form of analysis.