Brendan Nyhan

For those who are interested, I did an in-depth interview about political misperceptions with Robert Pollie of The 7th Avenue Project (KUSP Santa Cruz) that aired on Sunday. It’s now available online as a podcast or via this Flash player:
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

A New York Times article on the latest CBS/NYT poll (PDF) suggests that a majority of Americans believe the new immigration law in Arizona “would result in racial profiling”:

[D]espite protests against Arizona’s stringent new immigration enforcement law, a majority of Americans support it, even though they say it may lead to racial profiling…

[T]the respondents broadly agreed that the Arizona law would result in racial profiling…

However, as a reader noted, the poll question featured in a sidebar to the article doesn’t ask about racial profiling, which is typically defined as targeting individuals solely based on their racial or ethnic background. Instead, CBS and the Times asked the following:

How likely do you think it is that the new law in Arizona will lead to police officers detaining people of certain racial or ethnic groups more frequently than other racial or ethnic groups? Do you think that is very likely to happen, somewhat likely, not too likely or not at all likely to happen?

Given the composition of the illegal immigrant population, Latinos will almost certainly be detained more frequently than other racial or ethnic groups under any enforcement regime in Arizona or any other state (particularly in comparison with their representation in the population). The relevant policy issue is whether the Arizona law will lead to detentions of Latinos based solely on their ethnic background. The Times article vaguely notes that “the Arizona Legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer made changes to the law on Friday that they say explicitly ban the police from racial profiling,” but doesn’t specify that the changes bar consideration of race or ethnicity in enforcement “except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution” by removing the word “solely” from the following provision:

A law enforcement official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state may not solely consider race, color or national origin in implementing the requirements of this subsection except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona Constitution.

The poll question should have asked if people believe that this provision will be upheld in practice — that’s the question in dispute right now.

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]

It’s time to add Time’s Joe Klein to the emerging anti-dissent caucus on the left.

Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit busts Klein for his repeated use of “sedition” rhetoric against conservative critics of the Obama administration, as in this clip from the Chris Matthews Show a couple of weeks ago:

MATTHEWS: Well, making your point, we just watched Sarah Palin
and she said un-American [“All of this makes us more beholden to foreign countries. It makes us less secure. It makes us less free. And I’m not calling anyone un-American, but the unintended consequences of these actions, the results are un-American.”]. Now, she said it was just his policies, not him, but those words are license words. They’re permission words, you know?

KLEIN: I did a little bit of research just before the show on this little napkin here and I looked at the definition of “sedition,” which is conduct or language inciting rebellion against authority of the state. And a lot of these statements — especially the ones coming from people like Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sarah Palin — were right next — right up close to being seditious.

Klein subsequently defended this statement in a post on Time’s Swampland blog:

On the Chris Mathews Show Sunday, I said that some of the right-wing infotainment gasbags–people like Glenn Beck etc.–were nudging up close to the edge of sedition. This has caused a bit of a self-righteous ruckus on the right. Let me be clear: dissent isn’t sedition. Questioning an Administration’s policies isn’t sedition. But questioning an Administration’s legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine or overthrow it certainly is. A rally like this yesterday in South Carolina is a good example of seditious speech. It’s not illegal–unless actions are taken to overthrow the government in question–but it is disgraceful and the precise opposite of patriotism in a democracy.

Note the sleight of hand in Klein’s language. He fails to specify what specific statements constitute sedition on the part of mainstream figures like Beck or Palin, but suggests that statements “questioning an Administration’s legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine or overthrow it certainly is.” The problem is that “undermin[ing]” an administration is precisely what the opposition does in a democracy. Some conservatives have made baseless and inflammatory attacks on the Obama administration’s legitimacy (for instance, the birthers), but Klein’s statement sweeps in a range of more innocuous criticisms as potentially seditious.

In December, Klein made a similar charge against Senator Tom Coburn, calling a statement by Coburn “borderline sedition” (via Verum Serum):

Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma–who, with James Inhofe, constitute the most extreme Senate delegation from any state–prayed for the incapacitation or death of a Democratic Senator so that health care would be blocked. But that wasn’t all. He also offered this:

“The crisis of confidence in this country is now at an apex that has not seen in over 150 years, and that lack of confidence undermines the ability of legitimate governance,” he said. “There’s a lot of people out there today who…will say, ‘I give up on my government,’ and rightly so.”

This is borderline sedition. Coburn–who had a friendly relationship with Senator Barack Obama–is saying that giving up on the U.S. government is justified. This helps stoke the hatred of those extremists who see Barack Obama’s presidency as illegitimate. It also comes dangerously close to incitement to violence. It certainly deletes Coburn from the list of those who can be considered loyal to the most important American ideals. He should clarify what he means by these statements–and apologize for his hate speech, immediately.

And as I previously noted, Klein also suggested some Fox News programming “borders on sedition” back in October:

Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.

With these statements, Klein joins Salon’s Joan Walsh, Obama counterterrorism official John Brennan (here and here), New York Times columnist Frank Rich, and Fox News host Geraldo Rivera in equating harsh criticism of the Obama administration with treason — an almost precise inversion of the pattern under the Bush administration after 9/11. I would not defend many of the statements made by Beck, Palin, or Coburn or the coverage offered by Fox — indeed, I’ve frequently criticized each of them — but sedition is a term that must be reserved for direct efforts to foment an insurrection against the government of this country. Using it as a blanket description of harsh or misleading attacks on the Obama administration is an anti-democratic tactic that threatens to suppress and stigmatize dissent.

What’s sad about this is that Klein wrote very harsh things about the Bush administration — the sort of statements that were repeatedly described as seditious in the post-9/11 period. Indeed, were the situation reversed, Klein’s 2007 statement that “it is increasingly difficult to imagine yet another two years of slow bleed with a leader so clearly unfit to lead” might meet his own definition of sedition (“questioning an Administration’s legitimacy in a manner intended to undermine… it”).

In fact, Klein even praised Montana governor Brian Schweitzer a couple of years ago for pardoning state residents who were prosecuted for sedition during World War I:

[A]fter the Montana state legislature passed the resolution opposing the Patriot Act, Governor Schweitzer decided to put some icing on the cake by pardoning 78 Montanans who had been convicted of sedition during World War I–a far more egregious case of the government trampling civil liberties than the Patriot Act is. “Most of them were German immigrants,” Schweitzer told me. “Some of them were arrested for speaking German in public, others for refusing to buy war bonds. We had a big ceremony, and family members from 31 states came to honor their ancestors. It got pretty emotional.”

To be clear, Klein hasn’t advocated prosecution of any of the public figures he’s suggested have committed sedition. But shouldn’t he be more aware of the silencing effects that such rhetoric can have?

(Note: I’ve added Klein’s statements to my timeline of attacks on dissent against President Obama.)

From my Twitter feed:
-Great questions for journalists covering 2010 Congressional races from John Sides and Jonathan Bernstein
-Even by the sad standards of Sunday talk, Bill Maher and Al Sharpton together on ABC’s This Week might be a new low
-Rush Limbaugh is promoting the conspiracy theory that the leaking oil rig was sunk intentionally
–A Slate applet to measure epistemic closure in your web browsing habits
-Yogurt company in Argentina uses viral campaign to fight online rumors/misperceptions
–New British Medical Journal editorial on studies of bias in voter decision-making (discusses my misperceptions research with Jason Reifler)

Earlier this year, I noted a CBSNews.com post showing that 24% of Americans thought President Obama had raised taxes for most Americans and 53% believed taxes had been kept the same. The numbers, which were drawn from a CBS/New York Times poll conducted February 5-10, were even worse among Tea Party supporters — 44% thought taxes had been increased and 46% thought taxes were the same. In reality, Obama cut taxes for 95% of working families.

The latest CBS/New York Times poll, which was conducted April 5-12, asks the same question:

So far, do you think the Obama Administration has increased taxes for most Americans, decreased taxes for most Americans, or have they kept taxes about the same for most Americans?

The findings show that misperceptions about changes to taxes under Obama have gotten worse. The percentage of respondents who think taxes have gone up under Obama has increased from 24% to 34% among the general public and from 44% to 64% among Tea Party supporters:

It’s the all-too-predictable result of combining misleading rhetoric suggesting Obama has raised taxes with people’s biases toward their pre-existing beliefs.

Update 4/29 1:26 PM: Per Gary Wagner’s comment, I should clarify two points. First, my interpretation of the CBS/NYT question, which I think is a fair one, is that the correct response is that taxes have decreased. While some taxes have been increased, there has been a net decrease in federal taxes for most Americans under Obama. Also, some respondents may anticipate the likely increase in taxes for individuals making more than $200,000 and families making more than $250,000 in 2011 as having already taken place, but this increase (a) has not happened, (b) is provided for under current law and is not the direct result of legislation endorsed by Obama (though he has declined to extend the Bush tax cuts in this income group), and (c) will not increase taxes for most Americans.

[Cross-posted at Pollster.com]

From my Twitter feed:
-CJR’s Greg Marx nails the New York Times for lazy “he said, she said” coverage of the financial reform debate
–David Gregory and Perry Bacon should form a blame-the-voters club for journalists who don’t fact-check
–The unbearable hypocrisy of former Washington Times editor Wes Pruden accusing President Obama of “play[ing] the race card”
-Question: To what extent is Sarah Palin increasing the size of the GOP pie vs. diverting money away from races that need it? And are the additional funds she raises for the party offset by the money raised by Democrats who use her as a bogeywoman?
-Did David Brooks really think Obama would reduce partisanship? The idea was implausible from the start.
-Christopher Beam on the persistence of birtherism — another misperception that isn’t going away
-J.D. Hayworth — when presidential birtherism isn’t enough
-The New York Times reports on misperception-based health care reform scams including phony “death panel” insurance
-It’s scary when pollsters don’t understand basic statistical principles like the margin of error

I have a new article on health care misinformation in The Forum that may be of interest (link requires free registration; ungated copy here):

Why the “Death Panel” Myth Wouldn’t Die: Misinformation in the Health Care Reform Debate

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama struggled to overcome widespread and persistent myths about their proposals to reform the American health care system. Their difficulties highlight the influence of factual misinformation in national politics and the extent to which it correlates with citizens’ political views. In this essay, I explain how greater elite polarization and the growth in media choice have reinforced the partisan divide in factual beliefs. To illustrate these points, I analyze debates over health care reform in 1993–1994 and 2009–2010, tracing the spread of false claims about reform proposals from Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and analyzing the prevalence of misinformation in public opinion. Since false beliefs are extremely difficult to correct, I conclude by arguing that increasing the reputational costs for dishonest elites might be a more effective approach to improving democratic discourse.

The article covers several topics I’ve discussed here such as Betsy McCaughey, death panels, and naming and shaming in much greater depth. It also includes a new empirical analysis of survey data on misperceptions about the Clinton and Obama plans — here’s the key graph showing the perverse relationship between perceived and actual knowledge of the plans among opposition partisans (the y-axis is the predicted level of belief in the listed misperception):

Please read my article to find out more. (Note: It’s part of a special issue of The Forum on health care reform that’s worth checking out.)

While I obviously support more polling on misinformation, I don’t agree with Ezra Klein’s suggestion that it’s the best way to determine whether there is “epistemic closure” among ideological or partisan groups:

The question is how do you measure epistemic closure?

The easy answer is you test for its product: Misinformation. What you’d want to do, I guess, is continuously poll a standard set of questions based on empirical facts. “Has GDP grown since President X’s inauguration?” “Have global temperatures been rising or falling in recent decades?” “Does the United States have longer life expectancy than other developed nations?” “Do a majority of Americans approve of the president’s job performance?” That sort of thing. Have representatives of both parties decide the questions and then see whether respondents from one party or the other get more questions right.

The problem is that misperceptions are not necessarily the result of a closed information loop. Someone with a relatively balanced media diet can still end up with false beliefs — it all depends on how they interpret the news that they receive (i.e., the extent to which they are willing to accept information that is inconsistent with their preferences).

A better approach would be to measure (a) to what extent ideological elites on the left and right are failing to engage with outside sources of information and (b) to what extent their adherents are consuming political news largely or entirely from like-minded elites.

For an example of (a), see Hargittai, Gallo, and Kane on the insularity of linking patterns among liberal and conservative blogs in 2004 and 2005, a paper which includes this table comparing linkage patterns (more negative values indicate more insularity):

For an example of (b), see this new Gentzkow and Shapiro paper on ideological segregation online, which includes a table comparing the audiences of the online sources visited by liberals and conservatives:

Update 4/27 9:04 AM: See also this Baum and Groeling paper which finds that “Daily Kos on the left and Free Republic and Fox News on the right demonstrate clear and strong preferences for news stories that benefit the party most closely associated with their own ideological orientations”:

Update 4/27 10:57 AM: I neglected to mention another relevant paper by Lawrence, Sides, and Farrell showing the ideological skew of readers of liberal and conservative blogs:

Henry Farrell, one of the authors of that piece, objects to part of my argument above at The Monkey Cage:

Julian Sanchez’s argument – which started this debate – seemed to me to be making a somewhat different point. While he focuses on the impact of an alternative sphere of media, his concern is with the consequences…

These consequences could plausibly manifest themselves either if conservatives (or liberals; or whoever) only consume conservative media or if they consume both conservative and non-conservative media, but tend to weight the arguments of the former much more heavily than the latter. And we simply cannot figure this out from data on media consumption patterns (or, for that matter, linkage patterns) alone…

Data on divergent patterns of media and information consumption is valuable in figuring out what people think. But people interested in this question aren’t so much worried about the actual patterns of consumption as about its putative consequences for political beliefs. So I think that first cut research to identify whether epistemic closure is a problem should focus on consequences, contra Brendan, looking at the extent to which individuals with different ideologies tend towards closure across a variety of politically salient issues. But it would be nice to see a second wave of research, extending the stuff that Brendan talks about to look at how variation in patterns of media consumption intersected with false political beliefs. And a third body of research could do some experimental work to figure out more precisely the underlying causal mechanisms…

I agree that the studies above don’t quite get at the core of Sanchez’s claim regarding the unwillingness of elites on the right to acknowledge outside sources of information as valid. Focusing on the putative consequences of closure, however, still strikes me as far too indirect. Instead, why not try to measure Sanchez’s claim directly? For instance, one could code the sources referenced in the National Review and Weekly Standard and compare them to those referenced in The Nation and American Prospect. If Sanchez is correct, the sources cited by conservatives in a non-disparaging way are more likely to be fellow travelers in the movement than those cited by liberals.

(Note: See the papers linked above for more details on their data and the definitions of the measures in the tables.)

It infuriates me when pundits pretend to diagnose mental illness in their political opponents, but at least it’s obvious in most cases that the speaker has no psychiatric expertise. That’s not true, however, with the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, an actual psychiatrist.

Via P. O’Neill, the latest example comes from a Krauthammer column earlier this month bashing President Obama’s treatment of US allies (emphasis added, italics in original):

Well, said David Manning, a former British ambassador to the United States, to a House of Commons committee reporting on that very relationship: “[Obama] is an American who grew up in Hawaii, whose foreign experience was of Indonesia and who had a Kenyan father. The sentimental reflexes, if you like, are not there.”

I’m not personally inclined to neuropsychiatric diagnoses, but Manning’s guess is as good as anyone’s. How can you explain a policy toward Britain that makes no strategic or moral sense? And even if you can, how do you explain the gratuitous slaps to the Czechs, Poles, Indians and others? Perhaps when an Obama Doctrine is finally worked out, we shall learn whether it was pique, principle or mere carelessness.

Despite his claim to not be “personally inclined to neuropsychiatric diagnoses,” Krauthammer has repeatedly speculated about his opponents’ mental condition and joked about their need for psychiatric medications:

-“I’m a psychiatrist. I don’t usually practice on camera. But this is the edge of looniness, this idea that there’s a vast conspiracy, it sits in a building, it emanates, it has these tentacles, is really at the edge. [Al Gore] could use a little help.” (Fox News Sunday, 12/1/02)

-“The media could use some lithium. Not since I studied bipolar disease 25 years ago have I seen such dramatic mood swings as in the coverage of the first week of the war.” (Washington Post, 3/28/03)

-“Now, I cannot testify to Howard Dean’s sanity before this campaign, but five terms as governor by a man with no visible tics and no history of involuntary confinement is pretty good evidence of a normal mental status. When he avers, however, that ‘the most interesting’ theory as to why the president is ‘suppressing’ the Sept. 11 report is that Bush knew about Sept. 11 in advance, it’s time to check on thorazine supplies.” (Washington Post, 12/5/03)

-“Well, it looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again.” (Fox Special Report, 5/25/04)

-“In the face of Gore’s real breach of civil political discourse, which of the following is the right corrective: (a) offer a reasoned refutation of the charge that George Bush is both Stalinist and Hitlerian; (b) suggest an increase in Gore’s medication; or (c) do a Cheney.” (Washington Post, 7/2/04)

-Gordon Peterson: “Charles, you’re a psychiatrist: is he [former FEMA head Michael Brown] delusional?”

Krauthammer: “Well, he could use some medication.” (Inside Washington, 10/2/05)

-“As we can see, some of the proponents [of immigration reform] here need an adjustment of their medication.” (Fox Special Report, 5/11/06)

-“There’s no way you’re going to — this is a guy [South Carolina governor Mark Sanford] who, it looks to me as a long-distance diagnosis, a guy who is committing a near intentional — political suicide.” (Inside Washington, 6/28/09)

-Mark Shields: “Charles Krauthammer, last week on this show — no — you said that we were watching a man [Mark Sanford] go through a public nervous breakdown…

Krauthammer: “Listen, it wasn’t a hard diagnosis. (Laughter.) You don’t need a license, even though I still have one.” (Inside Washington, 7/5/09)

Krauthammer also defended former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s long-distance diagnosis of Terri Schaivo on the March 27, 2005 edition of Inside Washington:

MS. TOTENBERG: The cravenness – excuse me – I just think the cravenness of Bill Frist going to the floor of the Senate and saying, I have reviewed what turned out to be edited, surreptitiously recorded videotapes of this woman and I have made a diagnosis that you should all now follow. I mean, does anybody really think he would have done that when he was a doctor doctor?

MR. KRAUTHAMMER: You just commented on surreptitiously recorded tape of Tom DeLay without any hesitation. Why shouldn’t a doctor use – surreptitiously used video –

MS. TOTENBERG: Because he didn’t examine her.

MR. KING: But the issue is –

MR. KRAUTHAMMER: Because you go on the evidence that you have. The husband has not allowed a lot of testing in the last three years.

MR. KING: Bill Frist –

MR. KRAUTHAMMER: And we don’t know a damn thing. We ought to have a functional MRI and a PET scan and that hasn’t been done and in the absence of that you have no way of knowing…

What’s so bizarre is that at other times Krauthammer has condemned ad hoc psychologizing. For instance, in 2007, he correctly denounced a speculative column attempting to diagnose Dick Cheney with dementia. And back in 1999, he described such long-distance diagnoses as psychiatric malpractice:

As a former psychiatrist, I know how difficult it is to try to understand the soul of even someone you have spent hundreds of hours alone with in therapy. To think that one can decipher the inner life of some distant public figure is folly.

Even the experts haven’t a clue. Remember that group of psychiatrists, 1,189 strong, who in 1964 signed a statement asserting their professional judgment that Barry Goldwater was psychologically unfit to be president? The very attempt to make such a diagnosis at a distance is malpractice.

Indeed. Does the American Psychiatric Association have a professional misconduct policy?

If you want to see what the public believes about the size of the federal income burden, this CBS/New York Times poll question is not the way to do it:

On average, about what percentage of their household incomes would you guess most Americans pay in federal income taxes each year — less than 10 percent, between 10 and 20 percent, between 20 and 30 percent, between 40 and 50 percent, or more than 50 percent, or don’t you know enough to say?

As a reader pointed out to me, there’s no way for a respondent to know how to answer this question due to the ambiguity inherent in combining “most Americans” with “[o]n average.” Many respondents might think that “most Americans” can’t be grouped into one of those categories, and others might be confused by how to define “most.”

As it turns out, the bottom four quintiles (i.e. the bottom 80%) pay an average effective individual federal income tax rate of less than ten percent — an answer that was given by only 5% of respondents to the poll. However, as David Leonhardt recently pointed out, federal income taxes are only part of the overall federal tax burden; the average effective federal tax rate including payroll taxes, corporate taxes, and federal excise taxes is 22%. This number, rather than the income tax burden, is probably the more relevant one to poll on since most Americans pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income tax. Let’s hope CBS and the Times go back to the drawing board with this question.

Update 4/21 8:24 PM: In response to comments from David and Rob, I’ve updated the post to clarify some ambiguous language and to correct an error (following Leonhardt, I wrongly classified capital gains taxes as separate from, rather than part of, individual federal income taxes).

[Cross-posted to Pollster.com]