Swing States Project
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May 24, 2012 04:25 PM
Herald’s Caputo dives deep on diverging polls
Do other news organizations undermine their credibility when they don’t do the same?
FLORIDA — Voters here have reason to be confused this week as they look at two polls, coming out one day apart, with one showing Barack Obama leading Mitt Romney in the state and the other showing Romney leading Obama.
We begin with a poll released May 23 from Quinnipiac University, which showed Romney with a six-point lead over Obama in Florida (47-41, with a...
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May 24, 2012 03:37 PM
Many stations don’t factcheck super PAC ads: survey
Conference highlights difference in attitudes between industry, watchdog groups
Many local television stations do not consistently evaluate the accuracy of the political ads they air, according to survey results released Tuesday by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
As Annenberg director Kathleen Hall Jamieson acknowledged, the center’s study, released during a mini-conference at the National Press Club on factchecking and the 2012 election, is of limited utility: the data was collected via an opt-in survey...
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May 23, 2012 05:10 PM
Outrage angle covered—now how about those gas price claims?
Here's how the Denver Post and other battleground outlets can do better on the energy debate
Last week, the Denver Post ran a short “local news” piece headlined, “Political billboards in Colorado use energy policy to fuel debate.”
The debate thus fueled (and here covered by the Post) is not, mind you, about energy policy, but rather about juxtaposing—as do
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the 28 billboards, erected by the conservative nonprofit Compass Colorado, “in the Denver metro area and Grand Junction”—President... -
May 22, 2012 03:00 PM
What’s the swingiest state of them all?
By any measure, Colorado is at the center of the action in 2012
COLORADO — The term “swing state” is bandied about constantly in an election year, often without a clear explanation of what it means. But two recent articles in the national press offer a way to understand the term—and both suggest Colorado may play a key role in the coming election.
The first comes from Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight blog appears in The New York Times....
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May 21, 2012 10:50 AM
The over-covered image war
Journalists are exaggerating the risk that Mitt Romney will be "defined" early
The message war in the presidential election got underway in earnest last week, with the Obama campaign releasing a new attack ad and super PACs on both sides announcing their own big buys. If you believe some prominent voices in the political press, the stakes in these exchanges are already extremely high—especially for Mitt Romney, the likely GOP standard-bearer.
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May 18, 2012 11:03 AM
The entirely predictable failure of Americans Elect
A little poli-sci—or just recent history—would have helped pundits avoid the hype
On Thursday, the board of Americans Elect folded its presidential nominating process after the set of declared candidates repeatedly failed to muster the support required to receive the group's backing. Despite spending $35 million on "swank offices", a fancy website, and expensive ballot access drives, Americans Elect ultimately attracted neither a credible candidate nor widespread support.
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May 18, 2012 07:31 AM
The Obama camp serves up a Bain story
Some local outlets take the bait, while others offer a closer look
NEVADA — One of the moments in the 2012 presidential race that we all know was coming arrived this week: the Obama campaign launched its first round of attacks on Mitt Romney over his tenure at Bain Capital.
Unsurprisingly, there was a swing-state emphasis to the offensive. In addition to new TV commercials and a website targeting “Romney economics,” the President’s people organized...
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May 17, 2012 03:14 PM
Out of the living room, onto the trail
To gauge what’s really happening in the TV ad war, reporters need to talk to voters
The Living Room War was launched this week—the ferocious bombardment of attack ads that will make turning on a television in an up-for-grabs state like Ohio a high-risk, wear-a-metal-helmet venture for the next 25 weeks until Election Day.
But to cover the biggest TV advertising blitz in American political history smartly and to understand its strategic implications, reporters and pundits counter-intuitively will need to...
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May 16, 2012 03:30 PM
Debating Amendment One in North Carolina
Faced with an opportunity to lead civic discussion and take a stand, some papers fare better than others
NORTH CAROLINA — Last week, North Carolina voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment One to the state constitution, defining marriage as between one man and one woman only. The May 8 vote—coming a day before President Obama’s declaration of support for gay marriage—produced renewed national debate about gay marriage as well as jokes portraying this state as backwards.
Amendment One supporters said the measure was...
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May 15, 2012 06:50 AM
For TV, campaigns create big winners, (relative) losers
Political ads may not be all "gravy" for local stations—but they're still an awfully good deal
When Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum suspended his presidential campaign last month, the former Pennsylvania senator all but sealed Mitt Romney’s easy victory in the state’s April 24 primary.
Santorum also dashed the expectations of his home state’s broadcasters, who were counting on the candidate to keep the race competitive and their ad inventory—much of which had already been reserved by Romney’s campaign—in high demand.
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May 14, 2012 11:29 AM
Pushing back, making connections
Michigan political reporters have a job to do
MICHIGAN — Quinn Klinefelter is a longtime news editor at WDET, the National Public Radio station in Detroit. His voice is easily recognizable, and so, apparently, is his face. Klinefelter recalls walking down a block, absorbed in his thoughts, when he passed a man he’d never met. They were several yards past each other when the man turned back and yelled, “Kill the newsman! Kill...
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May 11, 2012 03:42 PM
In Nevada, a candidate’s fecklessness on full display
Some sharp interview questions leave a congressional hopeful squirming
NEVADA — In this state, where it’s legal to carry an unconcealed handgun, John Oceguera, the Speaker of the Nevada Assembly, didn’t even need to unholster his pistol to shoot himself in the foot.
He’d probably prefer to imagine taking aim at the messengers—the political journalists who roasted him on two television programs, and in print, this week.
Oceguera, a Democrat, is running to unseat...
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May 10, 2012 12:07 PM
Mapmaker, mapmaker, make me a map…
A glut of "swing-state" stories risks inspiring false certainty about the coming election
For a newspaper that believes that a decent fraction of its readers know that Kurt Weill wrote the music for The Threepenny Opera (51 Down in Wednesday’s Crossword), The New York Times curiously assumes complete amnesia when it comes to presidential campaigns. The hanging-chad long count in Florida that decided the 2000 election—down the memory hole. The 60,000-vote shift in Ohio in 2004 that would...
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May 10, 2012 12:20 AM
In Ohio, political money gets around
Dayton Daily News shows how local lawmakers shuffle campaign donations to cash-strapped colleagues
OHIO—A thorough peek behind a curtain of campaign cash this week by the Dayton Daily News shed real light on one way that political money moves.
The newspaper, in a story crafted by Jeremy P. Kelley, walked readers through the legal, but perhaps not widely-known, practices by which money donated to a candidate on cruise control is diverted to another fighting for his...
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About the
Swing States Project
Throughout the 2012 election season, CJR reporters on the ground in key states will watchdog local press coverage of political rhetoric and money in politics.
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Desks
The Audit Business
- The private-equity problem with Romney and GS Technologies Loading up a company with debt to ensure Bain’s own profits
- Sorkin’s Glass-Steagall straw man Of course its repeal contributed, directly and indirectly, to the financial crisis
The Observatory Science
- Evolved for exhibitionism? Wired column makes weak claims about human behavior, psychology
- Reparative journalism Reporter sinks a controversial paper on “ex-gay” therapy
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- Herald’s Caputo dives deep on diverging polls Do other news organizations undermine their credibility when they don’t do the same?
- Many stations don’t factcheck super PAC ads: survey Conference highlights difference in attitudes between industry, watchdog groups
Behind the News The Media
Blog
The Kicker last updated: Fri 11:09 AM
- David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, on the Times-Picayune cuts
- The Times-Picayune cuts staff and print runs
- Broadcasters sue to keep political ad buy data offline
- The Pulitzer Prize luncheon, storified
- A game of telephone fools the Times
