Brendan Nyhan

A couple of weeks ago I pointed out, via James Taranto, that the Washington Post used this terrible question to measure public support for the nuclear option (last link is PDF):

Would you support or oppose changing Senate rules to make it easier for the Republicans to confirm Bush’s judicial nominees?

The Post didn’t provide any context about the filibuster and how it requires 60 votes to be ended. Unsurprisingly, most voters said they opposed the change, a useless result that liberal groups have been touting ever since.

Now we have a bad question tilted in the other direction. Rasmussen Reports (of Hillary Meter fame) has published the following result:

57% of Americans say that “Senate rules should be changed so that a vote must be taken on every person the President nominates to become a judge.”

But no one is proposing that a rule requiring that a vote be taken on every person the President nominates. The rules change would require only 50 votes to end debate on nominees approved by the Judiciary Committee. Does Scott Rasmussen even understand the issue he’s polling about?

(For my ever-lengthening list of posts on the nuclear option clown show, click here.)

Via Kevin Drum, here’s Douglas MacKinnon on how cable news focuses on missing young, white women like the “runaway bride”:

Note to the news media — with an emphasis on the cable networks: Enough is enough.

Your continual focus on, and reporting of, missing, young, attractive white women not only demeans your profession but is a televised slap in the face to minority mothers and parents the nation over who search for their own missing children with little or no assistance or notice from anyone.

…The cable networks, which can certainly be considered centers of journalism, are also business centers with a harsh bottom line. The ratings for the cable networks are generally measured in the hundreds of thousands of viewers rather than the millions of viewers the major networks attract. Therefore, cable stations are constantly on the lookout for any story that may spike and then hold the ratings.

…I have a number of friends at the cable networks (or at least I did), and I have spoken to some about this very subject. While all professed disgust with the underreporting of missing minority women and young adults, most were very uneasy with the thought of shining a spotlight on their own management to ascertain an answer. “Besides,” one of them told me, “you’ve already figured it out. We showcase missing, young, white, attractive women because our research shows we get more viewers. It’s about beating the competition and ad dollars.”

When in doubt on matters of media economics, turn to Jay Hamilton! In his book All the News That’s Fit to Sell, he offers the economic concept that explains a similar phenomenon among the network newscasts — marginal viewers:

When producers on those programs are making decisions about what stories to cover… it is the interests of younger viewers (particularly younger female viewers) that matter. Two economic concepts, advertiser value and marginal viewers, help explain this. Advertisers are often willing to pay more for viewers 18-34 or 35-49 for a variety of reasons. Their purchasing decisions may be more easily influenced, and they may be harder to reach since they watch television less often than older viewers. Since females 18-34 are particularly likely to make the purchasing decisions in their households, they are a highly valued demographic group by advertisers. This means that programmers will try to attract younger viewers to the network evening news…

Though viewers 18-34 make up 18.3% of the regular viewers of network evening television, they constitute 38.1% of the marginal viewers (i.e., those who report that they sometimes watch the programs). In the provision of news stories, programmers may often take the interests of the average viewer for granted since these (generally older) viewers are unlikely to go elsewhere. In models of product quality, it will often be the desires of the marginal consumers that producers pay attention to since those consumers are by definition making a close definition about consuming the product. This means that at the margin, network evening news producers will consider the interests of viewers 18-34 in determing what topics to cover in the news.

It’s likely that the same thing is happening in cable news. Young women are the most attractive demographic group to offer to advertisers for the reasons that Hamilton explains above, and young white women are particularly valuable because their average income is significantly higher on average than that of non-whites. Unless the economics of the news business changes, it looks like we’ll be seeing runaway bride stories for a long time to come.

(PS Make sure to read the full book for Hamilton’s fascinating explanation of allegations of network news bias. He shows that the networks appear to directly respond to the interests of marginal viewers in making coverage decisions. In particular, their responsiveness to the interests of young women leads to more stories on issues such as gun control and education that may end up skewing liberal. And he also offers a fascinating economic explanation of the forces that drove the shift toward “objectivity” as the model for journalism.)

Kudos to Bruce Bartlett for making the obvious but politically difficult case for fiscal sanity — see his New York Times op-ed and, via Andrew Sullivan, this National Review Online column. Here is the key passage from the NYT piece:

After an initial effort at restraining Medicare spending – squelched by President Bill Clinton’s veto pen – Republicans in Congress have become almost indistinguishable from Democrats on spending. They have been aided and abetted by President Bush, who not only refuses to veto anything, but also aggressively worked to ram a $23.5 trillion (of which $18.2 trillion must be covered by the general revenue) expansion of Medicare down the throats of the few small government conservatives left in the House.

This behavior has led me and other conservatives to conclude that starving the beast simply doesn’t work anymore. Deficits are no longer a barrier to greater government spending. And with the baby-boom generation aging, spending is set to explode in coming years even if no new government programs are enacted.

…[M]any conservatives continue to delude themselves that all we have to do is cut foreign aid and get rid of pork barrel projects to rein in the budget. But unless health spending is confronted head on, even the most draconian cuts in discretionary spending won’t be enough to restore fiscal balance.

I am no deficit hawk. For decades I have argued that the negative effects of deficits are generally exaggerated. But unless spending is checked or revenue raised, we are facing deficits of historic proportions. It is simply unrealistic to think we can finance a 50 percent increase in spending as a share of gross domestic product – which is what is in the pipeline – just by running ever-larger deficits. Sooner or later, that bubble is going to burst and there will be overwhelming political support for deficit reduction, as there was in the 1980’s and early 1990’s.

When that day comes, huge tax increases are inevitable because no one has the guts to seriously cut health spending. Therefore, the only question is how will the revenue be raised: in a smart way that preserves incentives and reduces growth as little as possible, or stupidly by raising marginal tax rates and making everything bad in our tax code worse?

And from NRO:

I now believe that the best we can hope to do is make incremental improvements to the existing tax system and hopefully prevent it from getting worse. Unfortunately, because the current President Bush and the Republican Congress have allowed spending to get totally out of control, I believe that higher taxes are inevitable. In particular, the enactment of a massive new Medicare drug benefit absolutely guarantees that taxes will be sharply raised in the future even if Social Security is successfully reformed.

Too many conservatives delude themselves that all we have to do is cut foreign aid and pork-barrel spending and the budget will be balanced. But unless Republican lawmakers are willing to seriously confront Medicare, they cannot do more than nibble around the edges. With Republicans having recently added massively to that problem, and with a Republican president who won’t veto anything, I have concluded that meaningful spending control is a hopeless cause.

Therefore, we must face the reality that taxes are going to rise a lot in coming years. I believe that a VAT [value-added tax] is the least bad way of getting the hundreds of billions of dollars per year that will be needed. The alternative is higher tax rates that will be far more debilitating to economic growth.

Mickey Kaus catches Rush Limbaugh mashing together two Ken Starr soundbites to accuse CBS of distortion, when in fact it’s Limbaugh who’s distorting Starr’s position on the nuclear option (he opposes it). As Kaus writes, “When people on the left do that, people on the right call it ‘Dowdification,’ no?” Well, yes, but somehow I doubt the anti-Dowd forces will jump on this one.

(For the full Spinsanity archive on Limbaugh, click here.)

A preliminary Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis of President Bush’s proposals for Social Security shows that the combination of private accounts and progressive indexing would close only 30 percent of the 75-year actuarial deficit, move the date of trust fund exhaustion forward by 11 years, and add trillions to the national debt. Here’s the key table:

This about phaseout, not solvency. That much is clear.

Here’s TNR’s Noam Scheiber adding to the long list of what’s wrong with using George Lakoff as a message guru. The simple fact is that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about:

Yet, by and large, once he strayed from the broader point about the role of values, Lakoff’s advice in these situations was naive. An aide to Nancy Pelosi told me, for example, that Lakoff advised Democratic House members last December to oppose Social Security privatization by emphasizing the biblical obligation to honor one’s parents. On one level, it made sense to appeal to values rather than to focus on the benefit cuts that privatization would entail, which could etch the image of tax-and-spend liberalism further into voters’ minds. The problem was the specific values Lakoff chose to highlight. Pollster Guy Molyneux has conducted extensive survey research on attitudes toward entitlement spending. He says that, when it comes to values, voters respond much better to arguments based on fairness–for example, that they earned their Social Security benefits by working hard and paying into the system all their lives–than to arguments based on obligations to fellow citizens. That’s why, even though Social Security acts largely as a social insurance program, FDR designed it to look like a private insurance plan, in which your benefits reflect your contributions.

Likewise, on the dividend tax cut, the point Lakoff emphasized most strongly to Democrats was the importance of not calling the proposal “tax relief.” “They just bought into the [frame] of the other side,” he harrumphs, still incredulous. “I said, ‘The alternative is taxation as some sort of investment.’” But the “tax relief” metaphor resonates not simply because Republicans have successfully framed taxes as a punitive burden. It resonates because Americans have always had a deep suspicion of the government’s power to tax, dating back to the founding of the republic. “Not using the phrase doesn’t make people like taxes,” says one former Senate aide, who rolled his eyes at Lakoff’s prescriptions. “People have never liked taxes.” Lakoff responds by suggesting that U.S. history supports more than one interpretation. For every tax rebellion, there is another example of citizens working together for the common good–the barn-raising of frontier lore. But this argument doesn’t explain why tax rates in the United States have historically been so much lower than in, say, Scandinavia.

Other Lakoff recommendations have been even more off-base. A second Senate aide points to another Lakoff presentation last year. During the question-and-answer session that followed, the senators began pressing Lakoff for a single turn of phrase that would capture all the values reflected in the party’s many positions. Lakoff hesitated a moment, then suggested, “Come home, America.” The aide’s jaw dropped. “I sort of said, ‘What? Come home, America? That was the theme of the McGovern campaign in 1972. I don’t think that’s going to work.’” (Lakoff doesn’t recall the specific phrase, but says it would have been only one of several he suggested in the course of the discussion.)

(more…)

I’ll see your mumbo, and raise you a jumbo!

Rep. Jim McCrery is challenging the White House in the race to see who can use the most engineered language possible on Social Security:

One of the sharpest exchanges came when Representative Jim McCrery complained about the Democrats’ repeated use of the term “privatization” to describe the president’s plan.

“Democrats on the panel use it ad nauseam,” said Mr. McCrery, the visibly angry Louisiana Republican who heads the subcommittee on Social Security. “Nobody is talking about privatizing Social Security. Get over it.”

Mr. McCrery also objected to the Democrats’ characterization of “progressive indexation,” another component of the Bush plan, which would reduce the growth in benefits for all but the poorest retirees, based on a sliding income scale.

“It’s not means-testing,” Mr. McCrery said. “It’s further income-relating the benefit.”

Democrats on the panel began to laugh. Mr. McCrery shot back: “There’s two different things. I mean, you either know it or you don’t.”

Via Rush & Molloy, Bill Clinton characteristically focuses on “tactics” as the way to defeat Republicans:

“The guy [Max Cleland] left half his body in Vietnam,” he said. “They’re in the business to beat us. When they come out after you, it is a contact sport.

“Get better tactics. Don’t wuss around. And quit saying, ‘They’re so mean and vicious.’ They only do it because it works. When they don’t do it anymore, we can go back to a more civilized way of doing business.”

This is the same mistake Bill Clinton frequently made during his presidency (according to John F. Harris, Dick Morris decided that Clinton “was masterful at tactical maneuvers, but only average as a strategic thinker”). It’s the same mistake John Kerry made. And it’s the same mistake Democrats are making today as they try to mitigate voter concerns about their weakness on national defense and values issues without making fundamental changes in what they stand for.

If there’s one lesson that George W. Bush’s presidency teaches us, it’s that tactics don’t win; strategy does. Bush may lose a news cycle, but the long-run strategic thinking of Karl Rove has consistently paid off, while the short-term tactical maneuvers of Democrats almost never have. How Clinton has still failed to grasp this, I don’t know. But Democrats won’t beat back Republican attacks on them as weak on defense until they’re no longer weak on defense. There are no tactical solutions to this problem.

Media Matters points out another ridiculous study by the so-called watchdogs at the Media Research Center:

Since Election Day, network reporters branded politicians or groups as “conservative” 395 times, compared to 59 “liberal” labels, a greater than six-to-one disparity… MRC analysts used the Nexis database to examine each use of “liberal” and “conservative” on ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news programs from November 3 through May 2. We rejected labels that weren’ political (a “conservative investment”) or outside the U.S. context (all those labels of Pope Benedict XVI, for example). We also excluded labels applied by a news source rather than the network reporter.

As Media Matters notes, this methodology is screamingly incoherent:

The basic premise of this “study” — that if there are more mentions of the word “conservative” than the word “liberal” in a given period, then the news must be “biased” against conservatives — is so ridiculous that a fourth-grader could pierce its logic.

If precisely the same number of actual conservatives and liberals had been discussed in the news, and conservatives had been identified as such while liberals hadn’t, the MRC might have a legitimate gripe (though even this criticism would presume, as the MRC seems to, that “conservative” and “liberal” are inherently derogatory terms). But the real reason there are more mentions of “conservatives” than “liberals” is obvious: there has been more news about conservatives.

An additional reason to believe that MRC’s “study” is wrong: when Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford linguist, checked the claim that conservatives are labelled as such more often than liberals in a methodologically sound fashion, he found that liberals were labeled as such more often than conservatives, not less.

MM also flags a separate MRC study that illustrates the deep relativism of the contemporary conservative movement. It states:

This study of 125 news stories on Social Security between Nov. 15, 2004, and March 15, 2005, found four out of the five major networks biased toward liberal talking points. CBS and CNN had almost three times as many liberal stories as conservative. Overall, liberal talking points outweighed conservative ones by a margin of 2 to 1. Reporters favored extreme examples that made liberal points, while failing to explain key economic terms and concepts that would inform the debate.

But as MM argues:

A look at the supporting evidence shows the presumption that drives this “study” is the same that underlies virtually all of the MRC’s work: Any news story not dominated by unadulterated Republican spin is, by definition, a case of “liberal bias.”

If this is your starting point, it is not hard to find examples that support your pre-determined conclusion. If its “study” of Social Security coverage is any indication, the MRC apparently believes that even any fact that does not coincide with Republican spin constitutes a “liberal talking point” and proof of “bias.”

For instance, in the study, MRC coded any mention of the transition costs of President Bush’s plan for private investment accounts as a “liberal talking point.” The flip side of this contention is that, according to the MRC, when a news organization fails to report Republican spin as fact, it has shown bias. For instance, the report cited the following as an alleged example of bias: “On Feb. 12’s ‘Evening News,’ CBS’s Russ Mitchell said, ‘Mr. Bush said he’s open to any good idea to fix a system he claims is heading for bankruptcy’ (emphasis added).” CBS’ attribution of the bankruptcy argument as a claim of Bush’s and not as simple fact, according to the MRC, shows CBS’ bias. Of course, the idea that Social Security will be “bankrupt” is not merely a point of contention, it is highly misleading — even under the pessimistic projections of the Social Security trustees, the system will not go broke (it will be able to pay, at a minimum, between 70 and 80 percent of promised benefits, even if nothing is done to change it). Anything less than uncritical Republican spin, even when that spin is clearly misleading, constitutes “liberal bias” as far as the MRC is concerned.

The MRC looked for conservative arguments in favor of Social Security privatization, then claimed that the absence of those arguments from news reports constitutes bias. The study quoted conservative activist Stephen Moore, an advocate of privatization, to contend that “personal accounts would reduce the burden on the government and eventually create surpluses rather than more debt. But in unbalanced stories, this point was absent.” In fact, even the Bush administration has declined to endorse this claim; the administration has admitted that private accounts will do nothing to address Social Security’s long-term solvency. Moore is apparently assuming spectacular future stock market gains to make his prediction. But even if you agree with Moore, his is a highly contested, speculative argument. The MRC’s claim that not including it in a news report makes that report “unbalanced” exposes the assumptions that make its “study” so absurd.

(For more, see this Spinsanity column on FAIR and MRC.)

Brian Montopoli of CJR Daily dissects some especially ridiculous spin from Mary Matalin on Meet the Press, and does a nice job drawing out its larger implications:

After Russert brought up Pat Robertson’s claim that the federal judiciary is a greater threat than “a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings,” he showed a MoveOn.org ad calling on Bill Frist and Tom DeLay to repudiate Robertson’s words. He then asked Matalin, “Has this gone too far?” Here’s the subsequent exchange:

Matalin: It’s demagoguery. That’s sheer demagoguery.

Russert: Well, you don’t agree with Pat Robertson.

Matalin: I think that was an injudicious thing to say, but that the secular left has behaved imperialistically — there’s no other word for it. They have subverted the democratic process by taking their issues to the judiciary. What the so-called religious right has done has taken their petition and their concerns into the democratic process, into the public square. They organize and they try to affect legislation, as opposed to being the subverted process of democracy which is what the secular left does.

This is all demagoguery. There is a secular left. There is a religious right. It is — the way in which the secular left overestimates its uniformity is funny. They’re not — there’s not just Christian conservatives. There [are] a lot of the people who are concerned about traditional values and in politics and in the public square. There are lots of Jews, there are a lot of conservative Muslims. There are — it’s ecumenical. There’s Catholics. It’s across the board. There is not a uniformity. There’s lots of pluralism and they’re part of the democratic process. And this is just demagoguery on the parts of these left-wing extremists.

Got it? Pat Robertson’s assertion that federal judges are a greater danger than terrorists was “an injudicious thing to say,” but anyone who raises a hand in protest to that statement is a “left-wing extremist” exercising “demagoguery.” Rhetorical backbends don’t get much more twisted than that.

Why, jaded readers might wonder, does this particular abomination so exercise us? After all, there are any number of talking heads out there willing to lie and spin with reckless abandon and then exhibit righteous indignation toward anyone who expresses disagreement — and any number of talk shows eager to roll out the red carpet for same.

But Matalin, and “Meet the Press” itself, deserve to be singled out because they are thought to represent the best of political dialogue: a respected political operative who has worked in high places being grilled on the most revered political talk show in America. If anyone still thinks that the carnival barkers are confined to cable shoutfests while serious political dialogue endures elsewhere, last weekend’s display should be enough to put that fleeting hope to rest once and for all.

(Unnecessary disclosure: Bryan Keefer, who I used to work with on Spinsanity, is assistant managing editor of CJR Daily.)