Efforts to reduce partisanship within American government have usually failed. … But one thing that may actually make a difference in politicians’ partisan behavior hasn’t received much attention. That would be journalistic coverage of politics. … The upshot of this is that ideologically extreme elected officials are more vulnerable to […] Read more »
Video: Is Democracy Over?
How Big Money, Big Media, Big Data, Bad Science and the Entertainmentization of Everything Are Undermining America Marty Kaplan, Norman Lear Center, USC Read more »
Nate Silver addresses assembled statisticians at this year’s JSM
Nate Silver of 538 fame gave the President’s invited address this year at the Joint Statistical Meeting in Montreal. Nate began his talk by pointing out that because of his efforts to bring statistical rigor to topics usually covered by journalists he is often portrayed as a kind of statistical […] Read more »
Reuters/Ipsos Polling Explorer goes live
In January 2012, Reuters embarked on a polling project that flipped mainstream polling on its head. Instead of using telephones to gather results on a semi-regular basis, we partnered with the research firm Ipsos and opted to reach a huge number of mostly pre-screened respondents online. The result is that […] Read more »
Amid Criticism, Support for Media’s ‘Watchdog’ Role Stands Out
Public evaluations of news organizations’ performance on key measures such as accuracy, fairness and independence remain mired near all-time lows. But there is a bright spot among these otherwise gloomy ratings: broad majorities continue to say the press acts as a watchdog by preventing political leaders from doing things that […] Read more »
Obama is wrong. Traditional journalism isn’t dead.
In an Amazon Kindle interview released Wednesday, the president noted that upheaval in the media landscape has restructured the news industry and made it increasingly difficult for journalists to make a living. … Obama is correct that the economics of news has irrevocably changed. … But I want to highlight […] Read more »