Brendan Nyhan

As we showed in All the President’s Spin, the White House has a borderline Pavlovian response to every problem — more spin and PR mumbo jumbo. It’s the political equivalent of “more cowbell”.

But I’m still shocked that they spent $1 million to do a visual makeover of the Palestinian Authority (Atlantic subscription required):

The man responsible for bringing WiFi to the Muqata is Jim Wilkinson, Rice’s old press aide, a conservative Christian activist from a small town in East Texas. Once named one of the 50 hottest bachelors in America by People magazine, Wilkinson is now the chief of staff for Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. One of the big problems with the march toward Palestinian democracy, Wilkinson told me, was that the visuals were lousy. “Secretary Rice would show up at the Muqata, and you had broken glass, bars on the windows, people with AK-47s running everywhere.”

His solution was to spend a million dollars to remove the scary, chaotic scenes from the evening news, and from the eyesight of the secretary of state. By airbrushing the reality of a corrupt and dysfunctional state, his million-dollar makeover may have done more harm than good. “I brought over Scott Sforsa, who does visuals for the president, who’s obviously the best in the world,” Wilkinson says proudly. “Abu Mazen always looked disordered on TV,” he explains. “That’s because once you get over 40 feet on the throw for a camera, the autofocus kicks in in a weird way. We fixed that.”

Thank goodness we fixed that autofocus problem. Now the path is clear to peace in the Middle East! Oh wait…

According to NBC’s Tim Russert, President Bush made what might be his least credible claim ever in a meeting with Republican members of Congress about Iraq (video starts at 08:07 in this clip):

RUSSERT: The president responded, “I don’t want to pass this off to another president. I don’t want to pass this off, particularly, to a Democratic president,” underscoring he understood how serious the situation was.

Right, except for all the stalling tactics designed to pass this off to another president. Does anyone doubt that Bush will ask for another six months to allow the “surge” to work in September? And then another six months?

The final exchange between Jon Chait and his netroots critics has been posted (see also Chait’s article and part I and II).

Much of the carping by his netroots critics is tedious and/or nonsensical — particularly the posturing by Matt Stoller (with Chris Bowers), who was last seen claiming that conservatives “hate democracy.” However, Chait’s reply (which cites one of my posts) is well worth your time.

Rasmussen Reports is touting a poll allegedly showing that many Democrats think President Bush and the CIA knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance:

Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.

Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.

Overall, 22% of all voters believe the President knew about the attacks in advance. A slightly larger number, 29%, believe the CIA knew about the attacks in advance.

Here are the tables from the Rasmussen page:

Did the CIA Know About the 9/11 Attacks in Advance?
Yes	29%
No	41%
Not sure	30%

Did Bush Know About the 9/11 Attacks in Advance?
Yes	22%
No	55%
Not sure	22%

John Holbo at Crooked Timber had the same reaction that I did to the wording of these questions — they potentially confuse advance knowledge of the threat of an attack with advance knowledge of the attack itself. Until better questions are tested, I don’t think we can put much faith in these results.

The conservative pundit Bruce Bartlett thinks Democrats are almost surely going to win the presidency in 2008:

As each day passes, it becomes increasingly clear that the Democrats will win the White House next year. It’s not quite 1932, but it’s getting close to a sure thing. All the energy is on their side, they are raising more money from more contributors, and there is little if any enthusiasm for any of the Republican candidates—even among Republicans.

Of course, one can never rule out the ability of the Democrats to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. But sometimes the trend in one party’s direction is so strong that even the grossest incompetence can’t keep it from winning. I think 2008 is shaping up as that kind of year for the Democrats.

The markets disagree with Bartlett, however — the futures market currently puts the probability of a Democratic victory in ’08 at 56%:

In other words, Bartlett’s rating on Dem ’08 is BUY. Will he (or others) put some money behind that prediction?

Postscript: Bartlett goes on to advocate that conservatives support Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries because she is the most moderate of the major candidates. Sadly, however, he has to preface that argument with a disclaimer asking conservatives who view the Democratic Party as “the party of treason and socialism” to stop reading:

I’m sure that the first reaction of most conservatives will be to say that any involvement in the Democratic Party is unthinkable. Many view it as the party of treason and socialism. They could no more involve themselves in Democratic politics than a God-fearing Christian would consider working with Satan just because it looked like he was going to win.

For those of you who feel this way, stop reading. There is nothing more in this column for you.

In the conclusion to All the President’s Spin, which was published in August 2004, we warned that liberals were increasingly following the lead of conservatives and the Bush administration in embracing the worst spin tactics:

Some citizens might hope that things will get better when Bush leaves office. But the problem is unlikely to disappear regardless of who occupies the White House. Bush’s presidency has changed the rules of the game, accelerating a larger trend toward PR-driven deception. By altering the incentives for other politicians and political organizations, Bush has fueled an ongoing arms race in which both sides employ ever more sophisticated tactics to manipulate the public and the press.

Since then, we’ve seen the Center for American Progress, a top liberal group with close ties to Hillary Clinton, continue its pattern of deception. Top liberal publications like The American Prospect have become increasingly doctrinaire. Prominent liberal bloggers are increasingly dogmatic and hateful toward conservatives (see, for instance, here, here, and here). Even the excellent left-of-center blogger Josh Marshall has adopted the GOP tactic of suggesting that the other side is helping Al Qaeda (here and here) and has become increasingly sloppy in making partisan claims that are unsupported by the facts (here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Another troubling sign comes from the Berkeley economist Brad DeLong, a brilliant but frequently intemperate blogger, who responds to a Greg Sargent post criticizing the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman (a frequent DeLong target) by accusing Weisman and other Post reporters of having “a definite ideological agenda”:

And it’s not as though the mistakes of Weisman and company make equal-opportunity stupidity-driven mistakes. There’s stupidity here. There’s a fundamental misconception of the role of the journalist. And there is a definite ideological agenda here.

However, there’s no proof of an “ideological agenda” on the part of “Weisman and company.” Indeed, Weisman’s response to Sargent’s post suggests that the original complaint was overstated. [Update: On reflection, the Weisman/Murray lede is badly written and misleading.]

But let’s set aside the details of this particular controversy for now. The larger point is that DeLong is falling into the inferential traps that plague the anti-media “bias” groups:

(1) Selection bias — Does DeLong read everything Weisman writes, or are articles more often brought to his attention when liberals object? If the latter, then he may be seeing a biased sample of Weisman’s work. This is a classic problem in anti-“bias” polemics.

(2) Partisan/ideological interpretations — Too many attacks on media bias boil down to objections against reporting that critics don’t like. Can DeLong document a pattern of errors that would survive non-partisan scrutiny? Or do many of his complaints depend on premises that only Democrats or liberals would agree with?

(3) Failure to consider other rationales — Even if the overall pattern of errors in Weisman’s work is skewed against Democrats, that doesn’t mean that he is personally biased. DeLong raises “stupidity” and “a fundamental misconception of the role of the journalist” as partial explanations for Weisman’s behavior, but also asserts that “there is a definite ideological agenda here” because “it’s not as though the mistakes of Weisman and company make equal-opportunity stupidity-driven mistakes” (sic). But this is hardly sufficient.

There are many reasons why reporting may be more unfavorable to one side than the other that do not involve an “ideological agenda.” Conservative anti-“bias” critics have been attacking journalists for years and have succeeded in intimidating a large number of reporters. Republicans dominated Washington from 2001-2006, and it is well known that journalists defer to political power generally and seek to maintain access to those in power. Some unfair reporting may simply be the result of unconscious biases or pressure to tailor news to the tastes of their customers. In some cases, reporters may simply be manipulated by their sources. The list goes on and on. So why does DeLong implicitly rule out all of these possible explanations out and leap to bias?

(4) Inability to demonstrate motivation — Most fundamentally, there is no way to know who is actually biased or for those who are accused to demonstrate that they are not biased. It is an unprovable accusation. Neither DeLong nor anyone else can show that Weisman has an “ideological agenda.”

For more, see my previous media bias posts and our writing on the subject at Spinsanity, particularly our column on the Media Research Center and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

[Disclosure: I resigned from guest-blogging with Sargent on The American Prospect’s Horse’s Mouth blog in September 2006 after TAP’s online editor asked me to stop criticizing liberals.]

In a sane world, a top potential presidential candidate wouldn’t introduce himself to audiences with TV theme music:

The audience loved the preview, and applauded the criticism of Hollywood, but also thrilled to Mr. Thompson’s Hollywood stories. As he came to the microphone, the theme of “Law & Order” was played.

But then again, we don’t live in a sane world.

Update 5/7 1:50 PM: As Jon Chait recently pointed out, many conservatives like Thompson because of his acting, not his politics, so this may be a smart strategy:

Robert Novak recently noted, approvingly, that “[s]ophisticated social conservative activists” are flocking to Thompson. “Their appreciation of him,” wrote Novak, “stems not from his eight years as a U.S. senator from Tennessee but his actor’s role as district attorney of Manhattan on Law & Order.’” If this is how sophisticated social conservative activists make their political judgments, I’d hate to see the unsophisticated ones.

I’m sad to report that Josh Marshall, who used to be one of my favorite bloggers, recently argued that President Bush “has been helping Osama bin Laden,” reversing the inflammatory GOP charge that opposition to the war in Iraq aids al Qaeda:

Democrats should just hit right back on how President Bush has been helping Osama bin Laden for almost six years. Sounds harsh. But it’s true. Consider the facts. President Bush had bin Laden trapped in the mountains of Tora Bora. But he let bin Laden get away because Bush wanted to focus on Saddam Hussein instead. The president and the White House tried to lie about this during the 2004 election. But since then the evidence has become overwhelming. President Bush decided to let bin Laden get away so he could get ready to attack Saddam Hussein. So pretty much anything bin Laden does from here on out is on President Bush. And how about Iraq? President Bush has screwed things up so badly that he’s created a whole new generation of recruits for bin Laden. He’s created a whole new army for bin Laden. Not by being tough but by being stupid. And by being too much of a coward to admit his mistakes once it was obvious that the occupation of Iraq was helping bin Laden specifically and the jihadist agenda in general.

After half a decade, the verdict is pretty clear: President Bush has been the biggest ally Osama bin Laden has. He’s helped bin Laden at pretty much every turn — even if only by his own stupidity, incompetence and cowardice. And when the next big terrorist attack comes, we can thank President Bush for helping make it happen.

Note how Marshall adopts the same scurrilous tactics that Republicans have been using. He is putatively claiming only that the effect of Bush’s decisions aids bin Laden, but like the GOP, he repeatedly uses language that suggests that Bush wants to do so — “Bush has been helping Osama bin Laden for almost six years,” “President Bush has been the biggest ally Osama bin Laden has,” etc.

In particular, Marshall suggests Bush intentionally allowed bin Laden to escape, writing that Bush “let bin Laden get away” and that he “decided to let bin Laden get away”:

President Bush had bin Laden trapped in the mountains of Tora Bora. But he let bin Laden get away because Bush wanted to focus on Saddam Hussein instead. The president and the White House tried to lie about this during the 2004 election. But since then the evidence has become overwhelming. President Bush decided to let bin Laden get away so he could get ready to attack Saddam Hussein.

However, the Newsweek article that Marshall links to support this claim does not actually do so — here is the relevant information:

[I]n a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught.

Needless to say, Berntsen’s claim (which is disputed by former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks) does not prove that Bush chose to let bin Laden get away. The President was apparently warned that bin Laden might do so if US troops were not sent to Tora Bora, but presumably he simply miscalculated.

(Marshall has made a number of inaccurate or unsupported factual claims like this in the last couple of years, as I’ve noted here, here, here, here, and here.)

Marshall launched a similar attack against Vice President Cheney back in February, which I criticized at the time:

It’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone in this country not under active federal surveillance who has done more to advance the al Qaeda agenda than Dick Cheney.

I know that seems like hyperbole or a throwaway line. But it’s actually very true. Is America stronger now than it was before the Cheney era? Does al Qaeda have more fertile ground for proselytizing or less?

He then quickly reiterated the point in a followup:

How many American deaths is this goof [Cheney] responsible for? And who in this country has done more to advance the al Qaeda agenda and make the US more vulnerable to attack?

The point here is that no one is intentionally helping bin Laden. Both sides simply disagree about how best to counter him. Instead of debating that issue, however, we’re seeing more and more accusations that the other side is “aiding the enemy.” To date, these have overwhelmingly come from Republicans, but given Marshall’s stature, we may see a lot more of this rhetoric from Democrats in the weeks to come.

Postscript: I linked to Marshall’s post at the time because he flagged White House spokesperson Dana Perino claiming that the White House doesn’t play question the patriotism of its critics. As I showed, that claim is false. Marshall requested statements from readers responding to Perino. I sent him my post, but he posted anything further on the matter.

Hooray! The useless Byron Calame is being replaced as public editor of the New York Times by someone who may have something important to say:

The New York Times today named its next public editor, Clark Hoyt, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor who oversaw the Knight Ridder newspaper chain’s coverage that questioned the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq war.

This is an important step in the journalistic community coming to terms with the way it covered the war in Iraq. Even selecting Hoyt is an implicit admission that the Times failed — check out how it reported the story on his appointment:

In the prelude to the Iraq war and the early days of the war, Knight-Ridder stood apart from most of the mainstream news media in raising doubts at times about the Bush administration’s claims, later discredited, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said that record contributed to his selection of Mr. Hoyt.

“There was a lot of work Knight-Ridder did that was prescient, that wasn’t easy to do,” Mr. Keller said. “It’s always hard to go against conventional wisdom. I think it probably brings him a measure of credibility that helps in getting started on a job like that — that he’s been associated with a brave and aggressive reporting exercise like that.”

Mr. Hoyt said that in 2002 and 2003 he had fielded a great deal of criticism “from angry readers who believed that we weren’t being patriotic, from government officials who said that what we were doing was wrong.”

Most importantly, the appointment establishes Hoyt as a potentially important advocate for fact-checking political spin. Let’s hope he puts the position to better use than Calame.

Jon Chait’s TNR article on the “netroots” makes an important point: there is a new wave of liberal bloggers who are putting ideological/partisan loyalty ahead of the open-minded pursuit of the truth.

One device that Chait uses effectively is pointing out that even Matthew Yglesias, a famously open-minded liberal blogger, “confessed in March that he had soft-pedaled his opposition to gun control. ‘I don’t write about this issue much because, hey, I don’t want to be a wanker,’ he wrote. ‘Wanker’ is the netroots equivalent of the conservative term ‘squish’–an expression of derision reserved usually, but not exclusively, for ideological defectors.”

Yglesias objected to Chait’s characterization of what he wrote:

Rather than “confessing” to a pattern of soft-pedaling my views on the issue, I was–in my mind at least — bragging that, unlike many other professional journalists, I don’t go out of my way to harp on points of disagreement with the liberal orthodoxy purely in order to bolster my credentials as an independent-minded blogger.

Chait then pointed to a different Yglesias post in which Yglesias was more explicit about his motivations:

A separate question is whether or not journalists think of themselves as political actors. Overwhelmingly, I think journalists would tell you “no, they shouldn’t” and that most liberal (but not conservative) pundits would agree. To me, this is wrong. I could in perfectly good faith spend all my time looking for flawed arguments for conclusions I agree with, finding far-left people with unsound views to denounce them, and mocking the foibles of politicians whose views I agree with on the merits. A blog like that might even be entertaining and perhaps widely read. I wouldn’t do a site like that, however, because I think it would be irresponsible. I’m not a political activist by trade, I’m a writer, but hopefully my writing has some kind of impact on the world and I’d like it be a good impact rather than a bad one and that’s something I try to take seriously.

I want to add one more piece of evidence to the mix. Like Chait, I think Yglesias is about the best blogger out there, which is why I was similarly disappointed in this December 2006 post in which Yglesias admits he ignored the Sandy Berger controversy for ideological reasons:

With what I consider a great deal of justification, I tried to rigorously ignore the story of Sandy Berger poaching documents when it was first being pushed by conservatives who wanted to use it as a lever to continue grossly failed foreign and domestic policies. That said, it’s a long way from Election Day and, seriously, a new Inspector General report says he “removed classified documents from the National Archives, hid them under a construction trailer and later tried to find the trash collector to retrieve them, the agency’s internal watchdog said Wednesday.” Hid them under a a trash collector!

One assumes this will make it difficult for Berger to obtain any high-level executive branch appointments in the future.

In short, Yglesias didn’t write about the (troubling) Berger story because it was being pushed by conservatives with goals he opposes. He even half-jokingly cites the amount of time until Election Day as partial justification for bringing it up at all.

As Chait argues, if this is how Yglesias thinks, imagine what the rest of the “netroots” is like.