Brendan Nyhan

Via Josh Marshall, another poll is reinforcing the New York Times/Newsweek finding of an uptick in some measures of public support for the war in Iraq. As a reader previously suggested, is it because people aren’t paying attention? We won’t know until after Labor Day, presumably.

Josh Marshall makes explicit something that most observers fail to realize — their judgments of candidates are shaped by political circumstance:

The third is just how weak this field really is — something I knew but hadn’t seen yet quite so up close. I can’t imagine that a sentient Republican could have watched that 90 minutes and not been at least quietly aghast… But the issue isn’t so much that most of them don’t seem up to the challenge of being president. It is more that the political climate and the state of the Republican party in general makes their answers to most questions either off-balance, awkward or completely incoherent.

Conversely, the favorable environment lends the Democrats (perceived) stature, momentum, etc. Maybe it’s an obvious point, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone in the press making it when a campaign gets rolling. Instead, the press tends to manufacture biography-style narratives in which candidates won and lost due to their actions they took and the supposed qualities they possess. Don’t believe it.

Much of what’s gone wrong with elite journalism can be summed up with this perfect little anecdote:

One member of the [New York Times] editorial board, who gave up a large, enclosed office in the old building for one of these small fishbowls, growled to me, “There’s no place I can change into a tuxedo.”

We all weep for him.

Seriously, though, there’s a reason the elite press corps doesn’t care much about the economic situation of the middle class — they’re not a part of it.

Until recently, I didn’t realize that The New Republic’s statement on the Scott Beauchamp controversy included the admission that the scene in which he and others mocked a disfigured woman took place in Kuwait before he got to Iraq. Guess that line about how war “degrades every part of you” is no longer operative.

On the other hand, as Ross Douthat notes, the conspiracy-theorizing around this story — and the general level of attention it has received — are completely absurd, so I won’t say any more.

Update 8/8 7:03 AM: Two more things. First, the military is saying that the story is false but not providing enough details to evaluate the claim. Meanwhile, Josh Marshall downplays the significance of TNR’s admission by writing today that “TNR did its own reinvestigation of the diaries and found that with the exception of one error, the stories checked out.” But the error is far more consequential than Marshall suggests. The mocking of the disfigured woman is the lead anecdote of the Beauchamp piece in question. It’s more than 300 words of an 1100 word piece. And it took place before he got to Iraq. There’s no getting around that.

Once again, can journalists please stop quoting Newt Gingrich decrying partisanship without comment?

Gingrich was interrupted with applause once, when he called for an end to the biting partisanship critics say has polarized national politics and paralyzed the workings of government.

“We have got to get past this partisan baloney, where I’m not allowed to say anything good about Hillary Clinton because ‘I’m not a loyal Republican,’ and she’s not allowed to say anything good about me, or she’s not a ‘loyal’ Democrat. What a stupid way to run a country.”

For those who have (apparently) forgotten, Gingrich’s political action committee infamously encouraged Republicans to “speak like Newt” by referring to their opponents using “contrast” words such as “anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs,” “betray,” “corrupt,” “endanger,” “lie,” “pathetic,” “radical,” “shame,” “sick,” “steal,” “threaten,” and “traitors.”

The New Yorker’s Louis Menand has an incisive critique of biographies in the August 6 issue:

[T]he premise of biographies is that the private can account for the public, that the subject’s accomplishments map onto his or her psychic history, and this premise is the justification for digging up the traumatic, the indefensible, and the shameful and getting it all into print… [T]he premise poses a few problems.

For one thing, it leads biographers to invert the normal rules of evidence, on the Rosebud assumption that the real truth about a person involves the thing that is least known to others. A letter discovered in a trunk, or an entry in a personal notebook, trumps the public testimony of a hundred friends and colleagues. Biographers go into a professional swoon over stories that some famous person has made a bonfire of a portion of his or her correspondence, or that notebooks in an archive are embargoed until the year 2050. That stuff must explain everything! Why should we especially credit a remark made in a diary or a personal letter, though? The penalty for exaggeration and deception in those forms is virtually nonexistent. People lie in letters all the time, and they use diaries to moan and to vent. These are rarely sites for balanced and considered reflection. They are sites for gossip, flattery, and self-deception. But diaries and letters are the materials with which biographies are built, generally in the belief that the “real” person is the private person, and the public person is mostly a performance.

[The biographer Meryle] Secrest subscribes to this distinction between (as she puts it) “the private truth versus the public façade, appearance versus reality.” She is also, like many biographers, a believer in turning points—“pivotal moments in a person’s life when a single decision alters the future irrevocably.” It’s delightful to find (never concoct!) such moments, in which a chance encounter or a sudden revelation changes an ordinary life into the kind of life that people get paid to write books about, since those moments enable the biographer to construct the sort of conversion narrative, or Dick Whittington before-and-after story, that readers find familiar and take pleasure in…

The essence of the turning point is that it is retrospective. No one realized at the time that when little Johnny Coltrane put down the duckie he would go on to create “A Love Supreme.” But all biographies are retrospective in the same sense. Though they read chronologically forward, they are composed essentially backward. It’s what happened later, the accomplishment for which the biographical subject is renowned, that determines the selection and interpretation of what happened earlier. This is the writer’s procedure, and it is also the reader’s. We know what Coltrane or Cleopatra or Churchill achieved when we pick up the book, and we process the stuff we didn’t know, about their childhoods and their love lives and their abuse of whatever substances they may have abused, with this knowledge in mind. We are, in effect, helping the biographer do the work, because, like the biographer, we’re reading with an already formed image of the subject in our heads…

If you think about it, most political journalism and commentary suffers from the same epistemological problems. Like biographers, political writers tend to assume that the private self of politicians is “real,” focus obsessively on biographical trivia rather public behavior (see Krugman today), and engage in elaborate post hoc efforts to identify “turning points” (ie the “Dean scream”). It’s essentially biography in real time.

A Wall Street Journal editorial on Barack Obama’s most recent foreign policy speech suggests that Obama opposes the use of nuclear weapons “in any circumstances”:

[G]iven the Senator’s consistent opposition to the war in Iraq, it may seem peculiar that he should now propose invading a nuclear-armed Muslim country–all the more so since Mr. Obama let slip Thursday in an interview that as President he would rule out the use of nuclear weapons “in any circumstance.”

In fact, Obama said that he was opposed to using nuclear weapons against terrorists. The suggestion that he opposes the use of nuclear weapons in general is a myth resulting from some very sloppy journalism by the Associated Press, as Kevin Drum points out:

AP screwed up this story pretty badly. Here’s the first version of the AP dispatch that crossed the wire on Thursday (via Nexis, no link):

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday he would not use nuclear weapons “in any circumstance.”

“I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance,” Obama said, with a pause, “involving civilians.” Then he quickly added, “Let me scratch that. There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.”

An hour later AP had changed the lede to add “to fight terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan” to the end of the first sentence, but the damage had already been done. If you saw the first version of the story and didn’t read the whole thing carefully, there’s a good chance you thought Obama was forswearing American use of nuclear weapons very broadly. Even the second version is only a little clearer, which makes Clinton’s criticism (“I don’t believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or nonuse of nuclear weapons”) seem pretty reasonable. The AP story, especially the first version, implied something much wider than a simple declaration that Obama didn’t plan to lob nukes into caves in the Hindu Kush.

Via Drum, here is the actual transcript of the AP-Obama interview:

AP: Sir, with regard to terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan …

OBAMA: Yeah.

AP: Is there any circumstances where you’d be prepared or willing to use nuclear weapons to defeat terrorism and Osama bin Laden?

OBAMA: No, I’m not, uh, there has been no discussion of using nuclear weapons and that’s not a hypothetical that I’m going to discuss.

AP: Not even tactical?

OBAMA: No. I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance. Uh, if involving you know, civilians… Let me scratch all that. There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table so…

Unfortunately, the Journal’s statement is likely to be the first of many repetitions of this misperception.

Someone at the New York Times correction desk is seriously annoyed about their problems spelling the Attorney General’s name:

An article in some copies on Wednesday about Congressional efforts to pass legislation to expand the government’s electronic wiretapping powers misspelled — yet again — the surname of the attorney general of the United States, in three of four references. He is Alberto R. Gonzales, not Gonzalez. (The Times has misspelled Mr. Gonzales’s name in at least 14 articles dating to 2001 when he became White House counsel. This year alone Mr. Gonzales’s name has been misspelled in February and March, and in two articles in April.)

If only the Times could work up that much outrage about errors of substance…

Is there some sort of office contest where New York Times columnists compete to write columns on the most lazy or insipid topics?

First, we had Gail Collins on John Edwards and tangerines. Then David Brooks spent a whole column on an obscure book about old age from 1911 that he picked up while “rushing to catch a plane” (translation: he needed a column topic asap!).

But my personal favorite has to be Stanley Fish’s column today on how hard it is to get coffee these days. I kid you not. It’s the Seinfeld of op-eds — a column about nothing.
Here’s a sample quote:

But then your real problems begin when you turn, holding your prize, and make your way to where the accessories — things you put in, on and around your coffee — are to be found. There is a staggering array of them, and the order of their placement seems random in relation to the order of your needs. There is no “right” place to start, so you lunge after one thing and then after another with awkward reaches.

Unfortunately, two or three other people are doing the same thing, and each is doing it in a different sequence. So there is an endless round of “excuse me,” “no, excuse me,” as if you were in an old Steve Martin routine.

Was Andy Rooney unavailable?

The most disturbing aspect of the whole fiasco is that Fish is a Times op-ed contributor who substitutes for regular columnists; they presumably have no obligation to run what he gives them. That means the Times chose to publish this piece over the hundreds of far more worthy submissions the newspaper receives every month. What a catastrophe.

Thankfully, tomorrow’s paper (Monday) features something more useful — a Paul Krugman column destroying the pretense upon which most of the paper’s commentary and reporting rests:

Two presidential elections ago, the conventional wisdom said that George W. Bush was a likable, honest fellow. But those of us who actually analyzed what he was saying about policy came to a different conclusion — namely, that he was irresponsible and deeply dishonest. His numbers didn’t add up, and in his speeches he simply lied about the content of his own proposals.

In the fifth year of the disastrous war Mr. Bush started on false pretenses, it’s clear who was right. What a candidate says about policy, not the supposedly revealing personal anecdotes political reporters love to dwell on, is the best way to judge his or her character.

Is anyone at the Times listening?

PS: Times Select subscribers, you can send your demands for refunds c/o Pinch Sulzberger.

The economists Stefano DellaVigna (UC Berkeley) and Ethan Kaplan (Stockholm University) have published the final version of their paper “The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (sub. req. – see also an earlier non-gated version). Here is the abstract, which summarizes a striking result that has apparently held up under scrutiny:

Does media bias affect voting? We analyze the entry of Fox News in cable
markets and its impact on voting. Between October 1996 and November 2000, the
conservative Fox News Channel was introduced in the cable programming of 20
percent of U. S. towns. Fox News availability in 2000 appears to be largely
idiosyncratic, conditional on a set of controls. Using a data set of voting data for
9,256 towns, we investigate if Republicans gained vote share in towns where Fox
News entered the cable market by the year 2000. We find a significant effect of the
introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996
and 2000. Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that
broadcast Fox News. Fox News also affected voter turnout and the Republican
vote share in the Senate. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28
percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure. The
Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a
permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion.

DellaVigna and Kaplan have also posted a forthcoming edited volume chapter titled “The Political Impact of Media Bias” that explores their results in more detail. Here is part of the introduction:

We use our estimates of the
impact of Fox News to compute persuasion rates, that is, the share of Democratic
voters that switched to voting Republican because of exposure to Fox News. We
also compute mobilization rates, that is, the share of non-voters that turn out to
the polls because of exposure to Fox News. This section expands substantially
on the discussion of persuasion rates in DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007). In our
baseline calibration, we estimate that 4 to 8 percent of the audience was persuaded
to vote Republican because of exposure to Fox News. When we allow for a separate
effect on non-voters, we find that the mobilization effect of Fox News may have
accounted for one sixth to one hundred percent of the impact. We obtain similar
persuasion rates for the effect of Fox News on US Senate elections. These estimates
imply a sizeable, and large in some specifications, impact of the media on political
decisions.

Note to the haters: If this result seems obvious, remember (as I’ve pointed out before) that it is difficult to show cause and effect when studying the media because the outlets’ audiences are self-selected. Thus, showing that Fox viewers are mostly conservative would tell us nothing about whether watching the channel made them more conservative. In this case, DellaVigna and Kaplan are exploiting the idiosyncratic rollout of the channel across the country to estimate an exogenous effect on aggregate turnout and voting.