Brendan Nyhan

CJR’s Greg Marx has just published an in-depth examination of the difficulty of correcting misinformation that features my research with Jason Reifler (PDF) and my thoughts on the current health care debate. Here’s how it begins:

Pushing back against political misinformation has lately become a growth industry. The Obama administration is trying to counter false claims that proposed health care reforms will lead to government-sponsored euthanasia, both via appeals from the president and on a new Web site. Meanwhile, the British government, a sort of innocent bystander to the debate, is quietly setting the record straight about its own form of universal health care. And, as Michael Calderone reported in Politico, MSNBC recently devoted a lot of time to the unhinged “birther” theories about the president’s provenance, in order to mock or debunk them.

So will any of these efforts be successful? Not likely. Once factually inaccurate ideas take hold in people’s minds, there are no reliable strategies to dislodge them—especially from the minds of those for whom the misinformation is most ideologically convenient. That’s the upshot of the work of Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist and blogger. Nyhan has been wrestling with the task of how to correct misperceptions for years—he helped run the now-defunct Spinsanity, a sort of precursor to current Web sites like Factcheck.org and the St. Petersburg Times’s PolitiFact—but his recent research with his colleague Jason Reifler raises the question of whether this battle can be won.

Make sure to read the article for more, including a discussion of different strategies for correcting misperceptions.

Today the New York Times joins ABC News and the New York Daily News in shaming Betsy McCaughey (along with the Washington Times and the American Spectator) for her role in spreading misinformation about health care reform proposals in Congress:

False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots
By JIM RUTENBERG and JACKIE CALMES

The stubborn yet false rumor that President Obama’s health care proposals would create government-sponsored “death panels” to decide which patients were worthy of living seemed to arise from nowhere in recent weeks.

Advanced even this week by Republican stalwarts including the party’s last vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, and Charles E. Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator, the nature of the assertion nonetheless seemed reminiscent of the modern-day viral Internet campaigns that dogged Mr. Obama last year, falsely calling him a Muslim and questioning his nationality.

But the rumor — which has come up at Congressional town-hall-style meetings this week in spite of an avalanche of reports laying out why it was false — was not born of anonymous e-mailers, partisan bloggers or stealthy cyberconspiracy theorists.

Rather, it has a far more mainstream provenance, openly emanating months ago from many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey, whose 1994 health care critique made her a star of the conservative movement (and ultimately, New York’s lieutenant governor).

There is nothing in any of the legislative proposals that would call for the creation of death panels or any other governmental body that would cut off care for the critically ill as a cost-cutting measure. But over the course of the past few months, early, stated fears from anti-abortion conservatives that Mr. Obama would pursue a pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia agenda, combined with twisted accounts of actual legislative proposals that would provide financing for optional consultations with doctors about hospice care and other “end of life” services, fed the rumor to the point where it overcame the debate.

…The specter of government-sponsored, forced euthanasia was raised as early as Nov. 23, just weeks after the election and long before any legislation had been drafted, by an outlet decidedly opposed to Mr. Obama, The Washington Times.

In an editorial, the newspaper reminded its readers of the Aktion T4 program of Nazi Germany in which “children and adults with disabilities, and anyone anywhere in the Third Reich was subject to execution who was blind, deaf, senile, retarded, or had any significant neurological condition.”

Noting the “administrative predilections” of the new team at the White House, it urged “anyone who sees the current climate as a budding T4 program to win the hearts and minds of deniers.”

The editorial captured broader concerns about Mr. Obama’s abortion rights philosophy held among socially conservative Americans who did not vote for him. But it did not directly tie forced euthanasia to health care plans of Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress.

When the Democrats included money for family planning in a proposed version of the stimulus bill in January, the socially conservative George Neumayr wrote for the American Spectator: “Euthanasia is another shovel ready job for Pelosi to assign to the states. Reducing health care costs under Obama’s plan, after all, counts as economic stimulus, too — controlling life, controlling death, controlling costs.”

Ms. McCaughey, whose 1994 critique of Mr. Clinton’s plan was hotly disputed after its publication in The New Republic, weighed in around the same time.

She warned that a provision in the stimulus bill would create a bureaucracy to “monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost-effective,” was carried in a commentary she wrote for Bloomberg News that gained resonance throughout the conservative media, most notably with Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck.

The legislation did not direct the coordinator to dictate doctors’ treatments. A separate part of the law — regarding a council set up to coordinate research comparing the effectiveness of treatments — states that the council’s recommendations cannot “be construed as mandates or clinical guidelines for payment, coverage or treatment.”

But Ms. McCaughey’s article provided another opportunity for others to raise the specter of forced euthanasia. “Sometimes for the common good, you just have to say, ‘Hey, Grandpa, you’ve had a good life,’ ” Mr. Beck said.

The syndicated conservative columnist Cal Thomas wrote, “No one should be surprised at the coming embrace of euthanasia.” The Washington Times editorial page reprised its reference to the Nazis, quoting the Aktion T4 program: “It must be made clear to anyone suffering from an incurable disease that the useless dissipation of costly medications drawn from the public store cannot be justified.”

This story is a remarkable achievement given the pressure for artificial “balance” in news reporting. Let’s hope the rest of the media follows suit — the condemnation has to be near-universal to change the incentives for promoting misinformation.

Update 8/14 11:43 AM — Time for a few clarifications and quibbles that should be noted. First, James Fallows notes that the very strong headline quoted above appears only in the online edition of the Times; the print edition uses the much more hedged “Getting to the Source of the ‘Death Panel’ Rumor.” Also, as CJR’s Greg Marx notes, the Times description of McCaughey’s 1994 New Republic piece as “hotly disputed” is far too mild; the central claim of the article (that people would not be able to purchase health care services outside the Clinton administration’s proposed system of managed competition) was simply false. Still, I think the article represents a major step forward for the Times.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site Politifact has published an exceptionally clear overview of the health care reform debate that summarizes the key provisions of the legislation now pending in Congress as well as some of the key points of contention between the parties. They’ve also published a compilation of the ten most significant fact-checking items that they’ve published on health care thus far. Both should be assigned reading for every political journalist working in Washington today.

It’s sad to see Senator John Cornyn protecting his right flank by hedging his rhetoric on the “death panel” myth, which he said is “probably an exaggeration”:

Sen. John Cornyn (R., Texas) said the death panel allegation is “probably an exaggeration of what is actually in the plans.” But he said it stems from fears that Democrats would allow government intrusion in personal health matters. “The most important thing here is that those decisions must be left in the hands of the families and individuals most directly affected,” Mr. Cornyn told reporters Monday.

The allegation is not “probably an exaggeration”; it’s false.

Sadly, you can hardly blame Cornyn from a political standpoint. Republican Party chairman Michael Steele is defending the “death panel” allegations as “perfectly appropriate.” It’s just the latest sign of the GOP’s turn toward postmodernism.

David Saltonstall deserves major credit for this story, which directly identifies Betsy McCaughey as the primary source of the euthanasia myth and traces its spread through the health care reform debate:

Former Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey leads ‘death panel’ charge writing up talking points

Sarah Palin may have fanned the fire over President Obama’s fictitious health care “death panels,” but she didn’t light the match.

That was New York’s Betsy McCaughey, the former lieutenant governor most remembered here for oddly standing throughout Gov. George Pataki’s 1996 State of the State speech – then running against him after he dumped her from his ticket.

McCaughey, 60, is back as a self-styled expert whose writings on Obama’s health care plans are increasingly being cited by agitated conservatives at town hall meetings as proof – falsely, other experts and the President himself say – that he wants to “pull the plug on Grandma.”

“I believe it’s an important public service,” McCaughey said yesterday of her commentaries, which spin snippets of legislative language and medical-journal essays by a few Obama advisers to paint a terrifying picture.

“Members of Congress haven’t been reading this bill, and I think that’s shameful,” she added.

Others say what’s shameful is McCaughey’s distortions of the Democratic-backed House bill, specifically a section on “end-of-life” consultations that Palin – in a Facebook screed – dubbed “Obama’s ‘death panel.’”

“Betsy McCaughey’s recent commentary on health care reform in various media outlets is rife with gross – and even cruel – distortions,” AARP Executive Vice President John Rother said recently.

In reality, the bill section simply aims to provide Medicare coverage for once-every-five-year conversations with doctors over what life-prolonging measures, if any, a patient wants taken in the event of a terminal illness or injury. It’s an idea first championed by a conservative Republican senator, Johnny Isakson of Georgia.

But McCaughey took that section and ran with it, providing backup for Palin and right-wing media pot-stirrers to sound the “death panel” alarm.

McCaughey got the ball rolling on ex-Sen. Fred Thompson’s radio show on July 16, when she called the bill “a vicious assault on elderly people” that will “cut your life short.”

She then wrote a column July 24 that claimed Obama advisers don’t want to “give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson’s or a child with cerebral palsy.”

Days later, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) recited much of the article on the House floor.

Palin then unleashed her “death panel” comment, basing it on Bachmann’s floor speech. And the firestorm raged…

As I’ve argued, naming and shaming proponents of misinformation is essential to changing the incentives facing elites.

As misinformation becomes a central issue in the health care debate, we’re seeing some excellent examples of how news organizations should handle reporting on deceptive claims, but they’re largely exceptions to the rule.

On the positive side, Kate Snow of ABC News deserves credit for a television report in which she correctly describes the “death panel” myth as “misinformation” and calls out Betsy McCaughey as the source of the claim — an essential part of the shaming strategy I’ve advocated:

The online version of her story is also compelling. Snow and her co-authors make sure to attribute their debunking to “experts” and “doctors” and go out of their way to note that even Republican health experts agree that the claim is false. Here’s how the story begins:

Experts Debunk Health Bill’s ‘Death Panel’ Rule
Doctors Agree Health Bill Has No ‘Death Panel’ Requirement for the Elderly

Accusations that the health care reform bill now pending in the House of Representatives would use “death panels” to deny care to sick seniors and children with birth defects have taken center stage in the health care debate, giving the Obama administration even more of an uphill climb in getting the measures enacted into law.

But health care experts — even those who do not support the version of the health care reform bill now being discussed — note that these accusations are shocking, inflammatory and incorrect.

Unfortunately, many other journalists are failing miserably. A Los Angeles Times story by Christi Parsons offers an especially postmodern take on the debate — an approach signaled by a headline stating that “‘reality’ is in dispute.” (When journalists are reduced to putting the idea of reality in scare quotes, we’re all doomed.) In the excerpt below I have highlighted some key passages in which Parsons refrains from arbitrating between competing factual claims and instead presents the issue in the a “he said,” “she said” format:

President Obama and his allies in the healthcare debate began moving more forcefully Monday to rebut what they said was “misinformation” spread by opponents of the legislation and to spotlight the disruptive nature of protests at town halls held by lawmakers.

…A new healthcare “reality check” section of the White House website — at www. whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/ — is patterned after the Obama campaign website’s “fight the smears” feature confronting whispers about the then-presidential candidate.

In one video, a top administration aide says the claim that the proposals encourage euthanasia is a “malicious myth.”

…Melody Barnes, head of Obama’s domestic policy council, hosts the White House online video disputing the contention that the healthcare overhaul would encourage senior citizens to commit suicide.

…The euthanasia claim stems from a provision to allow — not require — seniors on Medicare to consult a doctor about living wills and directives for care.

Sarah Palin posted a note Friday on Facebook that suggested Democrats’ plan would lead to the rationing of healthcare.

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of healthcare,” said Alaska’s former governor, a Republican. “Such a system is downright evil.”

Barnes does not specifically mention the posting, but she disputes the suggestion that government bureaucrats would decide who got healthcare and who didn’t.

Parsons does briefly clarify that end of life consultations would not be required, but otherwise fails to make clear that the euthanasia myth and the Palin “death panel” quote are baseless. (The Washington Post’s coverage of President Obama’s New Hampshire town hall meeting yesterday took a similar approach.)

Other outlets seem to vacillate in their willingness to report that claims are false or misleading. For instance, the New York Times wrote on Monday that the euthanasia myth “appear[s] to be unfounded” — language that was already far too hedged — and then retreated further yesterday in a story calling such claims “questionable.” This is part of a general pathology in which reporters continue to treat misleading claims as plausible even after their own newspapers have debunked them in previous stories.

In short, isolated examples of excellent fact-checking are once again being swamped by waves of lame “he said,” “she said” coverage. It’s a sadly predictable outcome.

Update 8/12 9:09 PM — Parsons and Janet Hook were more clear in debunking the “death panel” myth as an “outright falsehood” in today’s LAT report on the health care debate:

Based on the persistence of nagging questions, and of at least one outright falsehood, Democrats have a tough road ahead.

Obama took an easy shot Tuesday at correcting the record, addressing former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s claim that Obama’s plan would create “death panels” to decide who gets to live and die. There are no such measures in any of the bills under consideration.

“This arose out of a provision in one of the House bills that allowed Medicare to reimburse people for consultations about end-of-life care, setting up living wills,” Obama said. “Somehow it’s gotten spun into this idea of death panels.”

Laughing off the assertion, he said: “Um, I am not in favor of that. I want to clear the air.”

[Update (6/30/10): Serious questions have been raised about the validity of Research 2000’s polls. The results discussed below should thus be viewed as potentially suspect until the matter is resolved.]

Two new polls are out measuring the state-level prevalence of the misperception that President Obama is not a citizen of this country.

Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling has released a preview of a poll showing that 47% of North Carolina Republicans think President Obama is not a citizen — an even more disturbing finding than his previous poll, which found that 41% of Virginia Republicans believed in the myth. By contrast, a Deseret News/KSL-TV poll found that only 13% of Utah Republicans — and 9% of Utahns generally — said that they believe Obama is not a citizen (via David Weigel).

These results are consistent with the national figures from a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll, which found that the myth was endorsed by 28% of Republicans (and 11% of Americans) overall and that it was more prevalent in the South.

What explains the state-level differences in birther misperceptions that we observe? The Washington Independent’s David Weigel suggests the difference may be linked to a lack of racial polarization in Utah:

So why does rock-solid Republican Utah have fewer “birthers” than, the deep South, or even fewer than blue Virginia and North Carolina? A lack of racial polarization has something to do with it. Utah, like the rest of the great plains and western states, got bluer in 2008 despite overall McCain victories and despite having a very, very white population. In Utah, Obama got 327,670 votes in 2008, up from the 241,199 votes that Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) got in 2004. For the first time since 1964, the Democratic candidate for president actually carried Salt Lake County. This happened with 31 percent of Utah whites backing Obama. Not even close to a winning margin; but in Louisiana, for example, Obama only won 14 percent of the white vote.

The reason, of course, for the lack of racial polarization in Utah is that it is overwhelmingly white. By contrast, states with large black populations (particularly those in the South) are often much more polarized along racial lines. Following up on my analyses of state-level Obama support by black population, I therefore plotted state-level GOP birther misperceptions against the state-level black population (with the aggregate US total added for context). While it is obviously far too early to draw any firm conclusions, the result is highly suggestive:

Again, the plot is only for illustrative purposes — it is far too soon to tell if the relationship will hold with data from more states. But the fit to the state data is almost perfectly linear thus far (R²=.99).

(Cross-posted to Pollster.com)

Update 8/11 1:53 PM: Full results from the North Carolina poll are here (PDF).

The White House has launched a Health Insurance Reform Reality Check website to try to counter myths about the legislation pending in Congress such as the false claim that it will promote euthanasia. Given my research on the difficulty of correcting misperceptions (PDFs), I’m not optimistic about the site’s effectiveness.

It’s also not clear that all of the content will reduce misperceptions. For instance, the website highlights a video headlined “Reform will stop ‘rationing’ — not increase it,” a claim that I find to be extremely disingenuous. The reality is that all public and private health care systems ration care in various ways and will continue to do so after reform. While it is true, as the site says, that “reform will forbid many forms of rationing that are currently being used by insurance companies,” it is also true that the administration’s efforts to slow the rate of growth of health care costs will almost surely lead to further restrictions on the treatments and services that are covered by publicly funded health care plans like Medicare, Medicaid, and the proposed “public option.” If these decisions are properly informed by comparative effectiveness research, they may not reduce the quality of the care provided to patients, but such restrictions are still a form of rationing.

With Sarah Palin inventing a mythical Obama “death panel” on Friday, the euthanasia myth is only going to spread, especially with weak-kneed coverage like this in today’s New York Times (my emphasis):

Conservative critics say the legislation could limit end-of-life care and even encourage euthanasia. Moreover, some assert, it would require people to draw up plans saying how they want to die.

These concerns appear to be unfounded. AARP, the lobby for older Americans, says, “The rumors out there are flat-out lies.”

The House bill would provide Medicare coverage for optional consultations with doctors who advise patients on life-sustaining treatment and “end-of-life services,” including hospice care.

“[A]ppear to be unfounded”? They are unfounded. Shouldn’t Times reporters have the knowledge to recognize this and the guts to write it without qualification?

[Update (6/30/10): Serious questions have been raised about the validity of Research 2000’s polls. The results below should thus be viewed as potentially suspect until the matter is resolved.]

Update (7/18/11): Given that questions about the validity of Research 2000’s polling remain unresolved, I’ve created a new version of the chart that appears in this post using data from other surveys:

Original post (8/10/09):

Since the release of a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll showing that 28% of Republicans believe President Obama was not born in this country, Chris Matthews, Ann Coulter, Bernie Goldberg,
David Paul Kuhn at Real Clear Politics, and other media figures have drawn an equivalence between the Kos poll and a 2007 Rasmussen poll which found that 35% of Democrats believe George W. Bush knew about 9/11 in advance.

The problem, as Media Matters points out, is that the wording of the Rasmussen poll (“Did Bush know about the 9/11 attacks in advance?”) almost surely conflates people who believe Bush intentionally allowed an attack to occur with those who think the administration was negligent in its attention to the potential threat from Al Qaeda. Even National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg conceded this point in a column published soon after the poll was released.

However, another, lesser-known poll used less ambiguous wording and found similar results. A July 2006 Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll asked the following question:

There are also accusations being made following the 9/11 terrorist attack. One of these is: People in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East.

When asked how likely this was, 16% of Americans said it was very likely and 20% said it was somewhat likely that people in the Bush administration “assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East.”

The partisan breakdown was not provided in the Scripps news report on the poll, but using the weighted data provided by Scripps (see update below), we can directly compare the proportion of incorrect or don’t know responses to the 9/11 conspiracy and Obama birth certificate questions:

There is an undeniable symmetry to the misperceptions, which skew in the expected partisan directions in both cases. The total proportion of incorrect or don’t know responses among Republicans on Obama’s citizenship (58%) is comparable to the proportion of comparable responses among Democrats on a 9/11 conspiracy (51%).

The pattern of responses by party is similar if we only include those respondents who directly endorsed the misperception in question (i.e. “very likely” to be a 9/11 conspiracy, Obama not a citizen):

Even under this more stringent standard, 23% of Democrats and 28% of Republicans indicated direct support for the misperception of interest.

In short, using a more appropriate comparison poll, the primary conclusion stands — both party’s bases are disturbingly receptive to wild conspiracy theories.

Update 8/10 1:39 PM: I’ve updated the response totals and graphics based on data provided to me by Scripps that is weighted by race, age, and gender to match Census figures. Applying these survey weights results in slightly higher estimated levels of misperceptions on the 9/11 conspiracy question than I previously reported. This accounts for the discrepancy between the publicly available Scripps data and their published results that I mentioned in the initial version of this post.

Update 8/15 10:39 PM: I just discovered that the first chart had not been updated to reflect the correct weighted response totals. Apologies — it has been corrected above.

(Cross-posted at pollster.com)