Brendan Nyhan

The reviews are in, and guess what? Ari Fleischer’s book Taking Heat is full of misleading claims and factual assertions — just like its author. Here’s Salon’s Eric Boehlert:

Elsewhere in “Taking Heat,” Fleischer, who chastises the press corps
for not checking its facts, writes matter-of-factly that the bungled
CBS report on “60 Minutes Wednesday” last September was based on
“forged” documents, an inaccurate statement. In January, the
independent panel set up by CBS to investigate the matter reported it
could not conclude that the documents were forged.

The book is filled with curious omissions… [T]here’s also no mention about how Fleischer, along with
off-the-record White House aides, helped fan the flames of a
fabricated 2001 scandal about exiting Clinton staffers who allegedly
trashed the White House. Just a week in office, Fleischer piqued
reporters’ interest by confirming the acts of vandalism were being
“catalogued,” while aides lavished journalists with descriptions of
phone lines being cut and trash strewn all over the West Wing. (The
General Accounting Office looked into the matter and concluded those
wild accusations were false.) Nonetheless, Fleischer writes, “Through
my first six months on the job, the press repeatedly tried to bait me
into a fight with President Clinton on a variety of issues. I tried
hard not to let them create a conflict.”

…Fleischer sets out to try
to document the press bias, how it has been unfairly critical of Bush
and adopted a double standard when the Republican moved into the
White House. Not surprisingly, given the rampant timidity with which
the press has treated Bush, that’s when Fleischer’s troubles begin.

On page 13, in one of his first barbs directed at the press,
Fleischer complains that during the contested 2000 election, the
press was eager to label the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Bush’s
favor to stop counting votes as “bitter” and “divided,” but days
earlier, when the Florida Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in Gore’s favor,
reporters shied away from the divisive nature of the decision to the
point where “most Americans would have thought it was a unified
Florida Supreme Court that put Al Gore on the doorstep of the
presidency,” according to Fleischer.

But a quick check of LexisNexis database finds Fleischer
pontificating based on his own press bias, not actual reporting at
the time. The “bitter” and “deeply divided” nature of the Florida
Supreme Court ruling was widely reported…

Examples like that, which undercut Fleischer’s thesis, litter “Taking
Heat.” For instance, riding a favorite conservative hobby horse, he
complains that while reporters routinely label Republicans as
“conservatives,” they shy away from tagging Democrats as “liberals.”
“Why have they largely stopped using the word ‘liberal’?” Fleischer
wonders.

Stop using? Just within the last year, according to Nexis, the New
York Times has published 325 articles that contained three or more
references to “liberal,” followed by the Washington Post (with 283
articles), Los Angeles Times (266), Associated Press (227), Chicago
Tribune (165), and USA Today (71).

On the flip side, Fleischer doesn’t like the word “progressive”: “I
don’t really know what a ‘progressive’ is, but I know the Democrats
like the word and the press use it, particularly in their coverage of
social issues.” Compared to the 325 “liberal” articles in the New
York Times over the last 12 months, the paper has generated 39
articles that feature “progressive” three or more times. (Not all
those articles dealt with politics, and neither did all the “liberal”
articles, but the number gives a fair indication of their use.) In
his analysis of the press, Fleischer argues “liberal” is underused,
while “progressive” is overused, the exact opposite of what’s
happening.

More trouble ensues when Fleischer complains about how journalists
use (or don’t use) “social liberal” compared to “social
conservative.” Fleischer writes, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the
phrase ‘social liberal’ in the press.” Had Fleischer searched Nexis
for U.S. media mentions containing the phrase “social liberal” that
appeared between 2001 and 2003 — the time Fleischer served as press
secretary — he would have seen the 725 matches it retrieved.

…Fleischer also complains that reporters, letting their supposed
Democratic bias seep through, fail to label the American Civil
Liberties Union a “liberal” organization even though they’re quick to
tag a group like Club for Growth as “conservative.” Here’s a partial
list of the news outlets that have referred to the ACLU as “liberal”
in the last 12 months: Bergen (N.J.) Record, San Antonio
Express-News, Associated Press, Time, Baltimore Sun, Washington
Times, Sacramento Bee, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Newsday, Seattle
Post Intelligencer, United Press International, Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel, Chattanooga Times Free Press, Kansas City Star, San
Francisco Chronicle, Oakland Tribune, International Herald Tribune,
CNN, and Dallas Morning News.

And here’s Time’s John Dickerson:

The Recount: As an example of liberal bias in the press, Fleischer asserts that the coverage of the Florida Supreme Court’s 4-3 decision to re-start the counting of votes during the 2000 election was reported without modifiers because it favored Al Gore. When the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to settle the election controversy in George Bush’s favor, the papers described the justices as “bitterly divided.” He cites a Washington Post story the day after the Florida decision as an example, saying the paper made “no reference to a close or bitter decision.”

Well, maybe not in the story that Fleischer cites. But that piece ran on A17, and was narrowly focused on how the Gore camp was reacting. The story about the decision itself ran on the front page, however, and cited “the bitterly divided court.” The paper not only used the very expression Fleischer says was missing, but the editors put it at the top of the paper’s lead story about the Florida ruling.

Labeling: Conservatives are always labeled as such, he writes, but liberal organizations are presented as objective actors. He uses another example from the Washington Post: “On September 5, 2003, the Washington Post, writing about Moveon.org, a left-wing group that has spent tens of millions of dollars against President Bush and in favor of liberal policies, simply called it “an online advocacy group.” Lets shelve for a moment that the story wasn’t about Moveon.org, as he makes it seem. It was about Texas redistricting and included a single passing mention of the group. If you look at all the 14 Washington Post mentions of the organization from July to September—the months surrounding the citation Fleischer chooses—Moveon was referred to as “liberal” or “left-leaning” or as “an organ of the left,” 10 times. The instances in which it goes un-labeled are either unnecessary because the political leaning is clear, or incidental. That’s almost the exact treatment The Post gives Americans for Tax reform, a conservative group Fleischer says is more frequently singled out for its ideological leanings.

(For more on Fleischer, see the Spinsanity archive and the numerous references to him in All the President’s Spin.)

This New York Times

Workers who sue their employers for age discrimination need not prove that the discrimination was intentional, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.

Somehow I doubt Linda Greenhouse can back up that phrase. Employers are likely to fight back by hiring fewer older workers, making the decision counterproductive, as Mickey Kaus points out:

And they say blogs are stupid: Here is the first sentence uttered by Brian Williams on last night’s NBC Nightly News:

Age bias. A big win for millions of workers over 40. The US Supreme Court just made it easier to sue the boss for age discrimination.

Well, it may be a “win” for particular plaintiffs. But is it a “win” for “millions of workers over 40”? That would seem to depend on many factors, including whether employers stop hiring workers over 40 for fear of later getting sued for age discrimination, or whether American corporations, deprived of the ability to lure new, younger, cheaper, more energetic workers (see. e.g. GM), lose out to foreign competition, causing their over-40 employees to lose their jobs. Maybe the net result of the ruling will be a transfer of income from under-40s to over-40s and a net increase for the latter group, but it’s a highly complex and controversial claim. … NBC’s hardly the first to buy into the facile plaintiff’s lawyer’s notion that a “win” in a particular lawsuit for a particular group of people means a “win” in the larger sense–as if litigation were costless and free of perverse consequences, as if damage awards are a bonus that materialized out of the ether. But it’s relatively rare to see this hack fallacy become the actual lede of a newscast.

Talk about a blind spot — this is almost painfully reminiscent of the reporters who treat “campaign finance reform” as a neutral term.

In fact, if you read the Greenhouse story, you’ll see that there’s no mention of potential second order effects of employers trying to protect themselves against legal claims by hiring fewer older workers. This is all you get:

While it remains to be seen whether employees invoking these claims will prevail in substantially greater numbers, the decision will almost certainly result in more such cases going to trial, rather than being dismissed at the early stages on summary judgment. That prospect, in turn, will require employers to examine any policies that have different impacts on workers of different ages and to make sure that they can justify the policies on a basis other than age

It’s a pure legal process perspective. And, shockingly enough, Greenhouse holds a law degree and is a career legal reporter. Of course lawsuits help people — it’s obvious!

It’s time for another dispatch from the “nuclear option” clown show — this time it’s Bill Kristol advocating using the Schiavo case as a lever for ramming through Bush’s judicial nominees on party line votes:

[Our families] deserve a judiciary that is respectful of democratic self-government and committed to a genuine constitutionalism. The Bush administration should nominate such judges, and Congress should confirm them. And the president and Congress should lead a serious national debate on the distinction between judicial independence and judicial arrogance, and on the difference between judicial review and judicial supremacy. After all, we are a “maturing society,” as the Supreme Court has told us. Perhaps it is time, in mature reaction to this latest installment of what Hugh Hewitt has called a “robed charade,” to rise up against our robed masters, and choose to govern ourselves. Call it Terri’s revolution.

As the DLC points out, this is nonsensical (and a disturbing turn of events for Kristol, who is widely regarded as one of the smartest conservative pundits in DC):

[I]t’s a truly weird argument. The Florida judges which Kristol urges us to “rise up against” were applying Florida law, enacted by the democratically elected Florida legislature, in the Schiavo case. The key law, which requires judges to make a finding of fact about the wishes and medical conditions of people in Terri Schiavo’s sad situation was sponsored by a leading Republican legislator. This law was amended by a Republican-controlled legislature in 1999 to make it specifically clear that feeding tube decisions are part of the same fact-finding process — an amendment signed into law by Gov. Jeb Bush. And when Gov. Bush sought last week to ram through a sloppily drafted bill aimed at exempting Terry Schiavo and an indeterminable number of cases from this law, the Republican-controlled Florida Senate stopped him.

Now, let’s take a look at those “robed masters” in Florida who Kristol says are trampling on democracy in so egregious a manner that Washington must intervene. Unlike federal judges, all Florida state judges serve limited terms of six years, and can be deposed by voters at the end of each term. Moreover, Florida’s Circuit Court judges, its trial judges, must face a non-partisan election every six years with opponents given every opportunity to run against them. Consider Circuit Court judge George Greer, whom Kristol basically accuses of deciding, as an act of judicial arrogance, against saving Terri Schiavo’s life. Greer was re-elected by the voters of his circuit last year by a two-to-one margin, despite drawing an opponent who was strongly supported by those angry at his role in the Schiavo case.

So here’s Kristol’s argument in a nutshell: It is a national imperative that we run roughshod over the traditions of the democratically elected U.S. Senate in order to let George W. Bush make life-time appointments to the federal bench to save us from democratically elected state judges applying the laws of a democratically elected state legislature. Who’s showing a lack of respect for “self-government” and “genuine constitutionalism” here? And who’s really aiming at the wholesale creation of “robed masters?”

(The only problem with this argument is the implicit endorsement of judicial elections, which are a disaster.)

WashingtonPost.com’s indispensable Dan Froomkin catches President Bush using one of his trademark rhetorical tactics:

Here’s the President of the United States using a straw-man argument to implicitly accuse opponents of his plan of being racist.

In Louisville, he said: “Oh, I know they say certain people aren’t capable of investing, you know, the investor class. It kind of sounds like to me, you know, a certain race of people living in a certain area. I believe everybody’s got the capability of being in the investor class. I believe everybody should be allowed to watch their own assets grow, not just a few people.”

Keen made mention of that quote in her USA Today story, but then simply explained that “Bush is trying to overcome concerns that investment accounts are too risky for anyone but the wealthy and are out of reach for minorities.”

No one, as far as I can tell, took notice of Bush’s implicit accusation of racism — in fact it looks like no one but Keen mentioned it at all.

The key to this tactic is that it allows Bush to attach the aura of racism to opponents of private accounts, yet it can’t be disproved because he never names a specific person or statement. Unbelievable. He frequently does the same thing when talking about the war in Iraq, attributing opposition to the war to “some” people who don’t believe Iraqis are capable of democracy, which again attaches the vague stigma of racism to all of his opponents.

(And while we’re talking about Bush’s tendencies to make up stories, don’t forget about the “trifecta” story, in which Bush told an ever-changing story about a never-documented conversation with a “fellow,” “guy,” a “reporter,” or a “male reporter” in which he publicly listed exceptions to his promise not to run budget deficits. For more on Bush’s penchant for nondisprovable but misleading claims, see All the President’s Spin in general.)

Update 4/3: I should also point out that Bush is the one making deceptive, logically inconsistent sales pitches to different minority groups.

Continuing my obession with documenting idiotic spin in the debate over the “nuclear option,” which would eliminate Senate filibusters of judicial nominations, here’s the latest:

1) People for the American Way sent out an email (PDF) claiming that the “nuclear option” is “an unprecedented political coup that would thrust the country closer to one-party rule”:

Radical Right leaders in the Senate — Bill Frist, Trent Lott, and Vice President Dick Cheney — are just days away from attempting an unprecedented political coup that would thrust the country closer to one-party rule.

People For the American Way Foundation has launched a new phase of our emergency campaign to save the filibuster. We’re sounding the alarm and mobilizing Americans to stop far-right leaders in their tracks. Preventing this disaster requires six principled Republican Senators.

Senator Frist’s “nuclear option” scheme relies on a bogus procedure that would need the backing of 50 senators. We need at least six Republican senators to stand up for checks and balances. Fortunately, many Republicans have deep misgivings about the “nuclear option.” They know it would damage the Senate and violate basic principles of American democracy. But they will be under intense pressure from Bill Frist, Karl Rove, George W. Bush, and far-right groups.

2) The Center for Individual Freedom, a conservative group, sent an email (PDF) to the Newsmax list claiming that the “liberal media” invented the term “nuclear option”:

A few months ago, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist vowed to finally put a stop to this obstructionism by employing what he called the “Constitutional Option” — or what the liberal media has dubbed the “Nuclear Option.”

But noted leftist Bill Safire traces the term to Trent Lott in a March 2003 interview with The New Republic, and tons of Republican senators have been quoted using it.

CIF also claims that Democrats tried to implement the “nuclear option” before, which is false as far as I know:

Senator Kennedy neglected to mention is that he voted in 1995 and in 1975 IN FAVOR of a Nuclear Option and called the filibuster, “the shame of the Senate and the last resort of special interest groups.”

Senator Robert Byrd also railed against the Nuclear Option on the Senate Floor.

But — just like Kennedy — Byrd failed to mention that he led the charge in the Senate to stop filibuster tactics in 1977, 1979, 1980 and 1987.

You see…one thing that is not really being mentioned in this debate is that the Nuclear Option is NOT A NEW IDEA.

In fact, Senate Democrats tried for years to implement the Nuclear Option REPEATEDLY, especially when they held the majority.

What HYPOCRISY!

Reading the charges and counter-charges of hypocrisy in the Schiavo case from both sides, I was struck by the relevance of a 1984 book I recently read for a political theory class here: Ordinary Vices by the late political theorist Judith Shklar. She has a chapter on hypocrisy that I think is exceptionally useful for understanding the explosion of hypocrisy charges, particularly in the debate over the Iraq war. Here are two of the most relevant passages:

[F]or while charges of hypocrisy may occur in a context of such moral consensus [ie during war], there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that liberal socities in wartime and postwartime differ from those in peacetime in this respect. The conditions of moral confusion and ideological conflict remain the same. Those who must unmask their opponents are reduced to exposing hypocrisy and attacking their moral and political prestige because, having no shared moral commitments, they cannot reach them directly. (p. 79 of the paperback edition)

…These charges of hypocrisy about war [between just-war theorists and Kantians] become systematic precisely because each side must justify itself to the other in terms of its sincerity, since neither can shake the other’s convictions about the substance of their disagreement — the status of war as such.

There is nothing new about such quarrels. Becket and the barons were already engaged in that sort of conflict. Becket no longer had any use for the notion of war as the noblest sport of gentlemen, while the barons were repelled by the idea of war as the pursuit of royal profit and power. What they lacked in that moment of confrontation was shared moral knowledge of any kind whatever. Each side looked for the psychological soft spot of the other and aimed at that. Then each was accused of hypocrisy, which was merely a failure to live up to its own standards, not a failure to meet mutually recognized obligations.

This is the normal character of political discourse between irreconcilable ideological opponents within societies that are so free that wars can be discussed openly even while they are being waged. In times of such stress, the intensity of recriminations is naturally great. One need only consider what “hawks” and “doves” say to each other. The “dove” routinely accuses the hawk of appealing to military necessity when in fact his party’s economic and political fortunes are his only concern. The “hawk” in turn will work over the dove’s psyche and will expose a moral show-off who covers up a private weakness with fanatic public displays. Since “hawk” and “dove” do not see the same moral scene, they can charitably blame each other for blindness and imbecility, which seems hardly adequate in times of extraordinary tension such as war. Therefore, each tries to dismiss and devalue the other by calling him a hypocrite, whicch is more offensive. Obviously this imputation does not imply shared knowledge, but mutual inaccessibility. In fact, the contempt for hypocrisy is the only common ground that remains, and that is what renders these accusations so effective. (pp. 80-81)

Remarkable stuff — almost eerily prescient about the state of our current debate. It’s important to also note that politicians and pundits routinely manufacture misleading accusations of hypocrisies and double standards, as we frequently documented on Spinsanity.

The political science building is old and overcrowded and we have to fight to be able to hire new professors, but Duke has money for the more important things… like iPods and plasma TVs. Yes, welcome to the priorities of the 21st century university.

The student newspaper here, The Chronicle, recently reported on the free iPod experiment that took place this year. The return on investment was, uh, not exactly high:

As the year-long “experiment” of providing 20-gigabyte Apple iPods to all freshmen winds to an end and the media frenzy slowly dies down, administrators have begun to evaluate the future of the project. Critics ask: Have students used them for educational purposes? Did teachers find innovative ways to integrate this technology into their curricula? Was it worth the $500,000?

Answer: No.

Freshman Anita Pai loves her iPod. She records lectures and listens to her music as she walks through the Duke campus, bopping along to her tunes. She even dressed as an iPod for Halloween. But many freshmen have been less enthusiastic about the technology, using it more for entertainment than academic pursuits.

“I could count on one hand the amount of freshmen I saw recording classes last semester. Nobody uses them for academic purposes,” freshman Janie Lorber said, adding that her recording device has never been opened. “I think it is kind of embarrassing that every freshman got an iPod. I think it makes us look rich and silly.” Several students agreed with her sentiment.

But many teachers have embraced the iPods, integrating them fully into the curriculum. Futhey said CIT assisted 11 classes last fall with technical support and loaner iPods, given to upperclass students without iPods, but more than 30 courses used the devices to varying degrees. This semester, O’Brien said 17 classes have been approved for support from CIT.

$500,000/28 classes that used them enough to require support = $17,857 per class. And I guarantee that virtually every one of those classes could have done the same thing with the Internet — the only difference is that students can download the audio files on to their iPod versus playing them on their computers. That’s just a matter of convenience — it makes no pedagogical difference. What an insane waste of money. (People did the same thing a few years ago, trying desperately to make PDAs academically useful — with similar results.)

And just to make sure that SUV-driving students aren’t denied the perks to which they have become accustomed, the Duke student government put up plasma TVs in the gym with a wireless radio transmission system:

Duke Student Government allocated nearly $24,000 last night to the Wilson Gymnasium Audio-Visual Project, cash intended to purchase and pay for the installation of six 42-inch plasma-screen televisions in the gym’s main exercise hall.

…Gym patrons will be able to borrow headsets to tune into FM radio waves transmitted from the muted televisions. Students’ own radios will also function on the FM transmission system.

It’s a hard-knock life.

Some of my personal information was apparently stolen from UC-Berkeley — along with that of about 100,000 other people:

A thief recently walked into a University of California, Berkeley office and swiped a computer laptop containing personal information about nearly 100,000 alumni, graduate students and past applicants, highlighting a continued lack of security that has increased society’s vulnerability to identity theft.

University officials waited until Monday to announce the March 11 crime, hoping that police would be able to catch the thief and reclaim the computer. When that didn’t happen, the school publicized the theft to comply with a state law requiring consumers be notified whenever their Social Security numbers or other sensitive information have been breached.

Why is this information on a vulnerable laptop that someone can just walk in and grab? Luckily, it appears that the guy who stole it hasn’t tried to exploit the information. More info here.

In an editorial about labor threats to pull their penson funds from investment firms that support privatization, the Wall Street Journal offers this inane criticism:

The problems with all this are many, starting with a rich irony: Unions are using the clout they’ve acquired from investing in the stock market to oppose a plan to let individuals invest their own tax money in the same market. According to a Tax Foundation paper, of nearly $2 trillion in public employee pension plan assets, 55% are invested in corporate equities. Labor leaders don’t mind stock-market investing when it enhances their own political leverage, but for individual workers to build their own wealth is too “risky.”

To belabor an obvious point, pension funds, 401(k) accounts, etc. are an addition to the guaranteed Social Security benefit. Replacing a large portion of the guaranteed benefit with stock market investments is a different matter entirely. Yet privatization advocates persist in confusing the two — see Josh Marshall on Greg Mankiw’s embarrassing TNR piece, for instance.

Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today analyzing Silicon Valley politics, a subject near and dear to my heart since I grew up in Mountain View, which is right in the heart of the Silicon Valley and home to Google, Netscape, etc.

Karlgaard makes one very strange claim — here’s item #2 on his list of differences between the Silicon Valley and San Francisco:

2. San Francisco loves Barbara Boxer and laughs at Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Valley likes Arnold and loathes Barbara.

But if you read the California senatorial election results for 2004 (PDF), you’ll find that Santa Clara County, which encompasses most of Silicon Valley, voted 66%-30% for Boxer over her Republican opponent, compared with 83%-13% in San Francisco County. Saying the Valley “loathes” Boxer is ridiculous. (Note: Schwarzanegger recieved 39% of the vote in Santa Clara County, compared with 40% for Cruz Bustamante.)