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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged campaign coverage

1. October 3, 2012 06:40 PM

   Forbes’s myth of the Reagan boom

   A columnist's misleading economic history

   By Ryan Chittum

   Peter Ferrara, currently of the climate-change denying Heartland Institute and formerly of Jack Abramoff's payroll and the Reagan and Bush I administrations, writes for Forbes that Mitt Romney will cut middle class taxes, no matter what Barack Obama's attack ads say. Maybe so, but since Romney's plan is mathematically impossible, the candidate doesn't get the benefit of the doubt. Romney's...

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2. August 21, 2012 11:00 AM

   Newsweek’s Niall Ferguson debacle

   A misleading cover story gets the wrong kind of buzz for Tina Brown's mag

   By Ryan Chittum

   It's been a long time since I've seen a cover story so comprehensively demolished as Newsweek's disengenuous anti-Obama piece by Harvard's Niall Ferguson, who puts together a greatest-hits compilation of the right's economic smears of the past three-plus years. As I write this, Niall Ferguson's Newsweek cover piece on why Obama's presidency has failed has racked up 13,351 comments, 6,130...

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3. August 23, 2012 11:00 AM

   The New Yorker on Obama as fundraiser (UPDATED)

   Fascinating reporting but an overly sympathetic portrayal

   By Ryan Chittum

   It's hard to read Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece on campaign fundraising without thinking about how embarrassing and corrupting it is that our system expects the president of the United States to suck up to big shots so he can buy 30-second TV ads on NCIS. “There’s been no thanks for anyone!” the major Democratic donor says. He adds that...

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4. August 31, 2012 11:07 AM

   The Wall Street Journal lets Paul Ryan go all but unchecked

   Misleading claims get ignored or given he said-she said treatment

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Wall Street Journal's coverage of Paul Ryan's speech to the Republican National Convention Wednesday, which was packed with one hypocrisy and misleading claim after another, has been awfully weak. On page one the day after, its story doesn't bother to fact check a single one of Ryan's claims, though even Wolf Blitzer knew immediately that many were bogus. Worse,...

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5. July 19, 2012 06:18 AM

   A dart to the campaign press corps

   ...for acquiescing to that whole "quote approval" thing

   By Liz Cox Barrett and Greg Marx

   It’s a diffuse target, but the campaign press corps writ large earns a dart this week for acquiescing to the scenario that Jeremy Peters describes in his much-discussed New York Times article, headlined "Latest Word on the Trail? I Take It Back": On the off chance you haven't seen it yet, here's Peters's lead: The quotations come back redacted,...

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6. November 1, 2012 06:50 AM

   A muddy Bloomberg story sets up Romney’s Jeep attack

   The wire's poorly worded story is misread

   By Ryan Chittum

   Mitt Romney's gotten in hot water with the nation's burgeoning horde of fact checkers by asserting that Jeep "is thinking of moving all production to China." That's clearly false. Chrysler is considering adding Jeep production over there, not closing up shop here and outsourcing everything to China. But Romney preceded his claim by saying he'd "seen a story" that told...

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7. October 12, 2012 03:57 AM

   A Web survey isn’t a poll, CNBC

   The network's tweet creates a misleading media narrative on the veep debate

   By Ryan Chittum

   Whoever was running the CNBC Twitter feed last night didn't know the difference between a scientific poll and a Web poll: [POLL RESULTS] Who do you think won the VP Debate? Paul Ryan: 56%, Joe Biden: 36%, Neither: 8%. #CNBC2012— CNBC (@CNBC) October 12, 2012 As I'm writing this, that misinformation has been retweeted 4,838 times, favorited 405. Eh, it's...

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8. October 11, 2012 06:50 AM

   Ask Obama This: What about housing?

   What went wrong with the administration's mortgage policies

   By Ryan Chittum

   Over the final month of the campaign, CJR will run a series of posts under the headline “Ask Obama This” and “Ask Romney This,” suggesting questions that reporters should pose to the presidential candidates. So far we've asked President Obama about his jobs plan, and Governor Romney about foreign policy. This installment asks President Obama about his housing policies. When...

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9. September 19, 2012 06:50 AM

   Audit Notes: ‘makers and takers’ edition

   Romney's "47 percent" comment continues to reverberate

   By Ryan Chittum

   A big part of the problem with Mitt Romney's "47 percent" characterization, as I wrote yesterday, is that it uses federal income tax to snooker people not paying close attention into thinking half the country pays no taxes at all. That's cherry picking the most progressive part of the tax system to paint a picture of half a country of...

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10. October 22, 2012 06:50 AM

    Audit Notes: advising Obama, the leverage incentive, Jack Welch

    The NYT looks at the insider/outsider roles of Anita Dunn

    By Ryan Chittum

    The New York Times had an excellent story this weekend on Anita Dunn, the Obama adviser who's got one foot in the private sector and one in his presidential campaign: And working on behalf of Pratt & Whitney, a military contractor, SKDK told other consultants that the administration appeared unwilling to move aggressively to kill a deal forcing the company...

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11. August 16, 2012 02:44 AM

    Audit Notes: Bill Black on CNBC, LAT eyes Ryan’s budget, robosigning

    The ex-regulator might as well have been beamed in by the Curiosity rover

    By Ryan Chittum

    Bill Black goes on CNBC and shreds Maria Bartiromo and Bethany McLean on whether Goldman Sachs (and others) could and should have been prosecuted for fraud related to the financial crisis: If there's damage in the green room, I'd like to imagine it's from Black banging his head on the wall afterward, yelling repeatedly, "No it's not a great point—it's...

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12. September 7, 2012 06:50 AM

    Audit Notes: Journal Register, Clinton and ‘can’t find workers,’ AP flop

    The bankrupt company's owner isn't doing well itself

    By Ryan Chittum

    Read Martin Langeveld's super-sharp take for the Nieman Lab on what the Journal Register bankruptcy means and what might be behind it: But it’s now clear that the “stacking of digital dimes” to replace digital dollars hasn’t happened fast enough. And if there actually was an Alden-led strategy at Digital First to truly capitalize on the combination’s clout through new...

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13. November 9, 2012 06:50 AM

    Audit Notes: low-info billionaires, Trump the taker, Elizabeth Warren

    Money apparently can't buy a firm grip on reality

    By Ryan Chittum

    One of the things this election proved conclusively is that even billionaires can be low-information voters. Here's Bloomberg BusinessWeek on billionaire David Siegel, the guy who's building the a 90,000 square foot house and who all but told his workers to vote for Romney if they wanted to keep their jobs (emphasis mine): I think it’s going to be a...

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14. October 5, 2012 06:50 AM

    Audit Notes: Romney and taxes, prison phone racket, WSJ

    The Atlantic eyes the Republican's corporate tax plan

    By Ryan Chittum

    Nobody can figure out what exactly Mitt Romney wants to do with taxes. His plan is mathematically impossible, and Wednesday night's debate just confused matters even more. The candidate actually said at one point in the debate that "I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income Americans," which is either false or an epic flipflop. By the lack of...

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15. August 14, 2012 01:56 AM

    Audit Notes: Romney’s Ryan taxes, FDR or Ayn Rand, Morton Mintz

    The Atlantic on what would be Mitt's "Path to Prosperity"

    By Ryan Chittum

    The Atlantic's Matthew O'Brien has the best snap financial analysis of Mitt Romney's pick of Paul Ryan as a running mate, reporting that "Under Paul Ryan's plan, Mitt Romney wouldn't pay any taxes for the next ten years -- or any of the years after that." Well, maybe not quite nothing. In 2010 -- the only year we have seen...

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16. August 15, 2012 06:50 AM

    Audit Notes: Romney’s taxes, NBC’s win, turning off the Web

    By Ryan Chittum

    Joe Nocera writes about the sharp choice facing voters in November, and so it is. But this strikes me as a wrongheaded sentiment for a journalist to have (emphasis mine): Ever since the campaign entered the postprimary, preconvention phase, with the two candidates turning their attention to each other, it has been a depressing spectacle. The Democrats have demanded that...

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17. August 29, 2012 06:50 AM

    Audit Notes: the national debt, Bailout, ProPublica on campaign finance

    GOP jujitsu on Obama and deficits

    By Ryan Chittum

    Ezra Klein, anticipating a lot of Republicans disingenuously blaming Obama for the national debt, points to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities chart showing that the increase in the debt comes almost entirely from Bush-era policies: Kevin Drum says, "Their success at convincing half the country that Barack Obama is responsible for our soaring debt is surely one of...

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18. September 10, 2012 06:50 AM

    Audit Notes: WSJ Live, scot free, Martin Feldstein

    Lucrative video streams soar at the Journal

    By Ryan Chittum

    Wall Street Journal deputy managing editor Alan Murray says the paper's WSJ Live video efforts are growing at a torrid pace, quadrupling last year's pace with 28 million streams last month, Forbes reports. The fast growth of WSJ Live hasn’t been lost on professionals in the video business, including some of the TV folks from Fox. Murray said that at...

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19. August 21, 2012 03:00 PM

    Candidates clam up on climate

    Reporters call out Obama and Romney’s silence

    By Curtis Brainard

    Nary a word has been spoken about climate change on the presidential campaign trail, and it’s a silence that some journalists find deafening. In the last few weeks, a variety of reporters have called out the candidates for utterly ignoring the issue. The Associated Press’s Steven R. Hurst, for instance, reminded readers that just four months ago, Barack Obama told...

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20. November 12, 2012 06:50 AM

    Context-free market reporting on a post-election dive

    First-term bull market goes unmentioned after a November 7 stock dip

    By Ryan Chittum

    The stock market dive the day after President Obama was re-elected, dropping 320 points, or 2.4 percent. The Drudge Report, the testing ground/early-warning system for right-wing memes, put the Dow as its top post-election story, telling Obama to "own it": Fair enough, but as I wrote on Twitter the other day, if Obama has to own that one-day 2.4 percent...

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