Gloves on! Gloves off!

How far off the rails has coverage of the electoral process gotten, and how did it get there? Let's start by asking a few papers what went on last night when the Democratic candidates got together to debate. How did it look down at the Freep?

Gloves come off, sparks fly as Super Tuesday nears

Biff! Thwack! Tough stuff, huh? What say you, St. Pete Times?
Clinton, Obama debate gently

Uh ... Palm Beach Post?
Clinton and Obama attack Republicans instead of each other

You there in Des Moines?
Obama, Clinton forgo nastiness for some niceties at L.A. debate

Newsday?
Cheek to cheek

You can fairly ask whether the papers were watching the same debate. But it's pretty clear that they were at least watching the same candidates:

Bare knuckles for Clinton, Obama
Chattanooga Times-Free Press, 1/23
Obama, Hillary take off gloves
Chicago Sun-Times, 1/22
Democrats make nice during debate, but gloves come off on Saturday
Las Vegas Review Journal, 1/16

Of course, the gloves were coming off across the aisle too:
Huckabee takes off gloves when Thompson calls him ‘liberal’
AP, 1/12
GOP rivals take off the gloves
Washington Times, 1/7
With gloves off, Romney distorts
Manchester Union Leader, 1/2

Pretty clear what we mean -- except when the opposite cliche means the same thing:

Trailing rivals, Edwards puts on gloves
Charlotte Observer, 11/1

As George Orwell suggested six decades ago in "Politics and the English Language," when one critic says a work's outstanding feature is its "living quality" and another points to its "peculiar deadness," you can be pretty sure they aren't talking about any feature that has a concrete referent in real life. That, I think, is what's been wrong with the deeply unsatisfying (if you'd like to say "generally inept and irresponsible," go right ahead) coverage of the nominating process. The big heds, and the big centerpiece packages, aren't about substance. They're about myth.

That's not the same as the much-decried "horse race" coverage. True, the horse-race aspects are grossly overreported, and in many cases distorted beyond recognition by reporters and editors who really ought to be cudgeled about the face and head with a basic stats text,* but they're not by definition irrelevant. The real problem is summed up in this Observer lede from three weeks ago:

A Democratic donnybrook. A Republican showdown. Potential last stands.
Those are among the story lines in South Carolina's upcoming primaries.

The "story lines" are myths -- not in the sense of fabrications, or tales of merrie England's music thyng and ye grene knight, but stories that express a society's "prevailing ideals, ideologies, values, and beliefs."** Right when we ought to be telling stories about substance, we end up telling stories about stories instead. That's how "the most wide-open presidential race in a half century," as the AP described it Dec. 27, could be blown wide open by Iowa, and again by New Hampshire and ... excuse me, Michigan, what was that?

Romney blasts GOP race wide open
Detroit News
Romney win keeps race wide open
Charlotte Observer
Romney’s Michigan win blows open GOP field ahead of S. Carolina primary
Columbus Dispatch
Mich. win leaves race wide open
Raleigh N&O

So the same event either blew or didn't blow the (already wide open or not) race wide open -- just as "taking the gloves off" is another way of saying "dancing cheek to cheek" (and "putting the gloves on" is either the same as taking them off or some sort of Forbidden Tango). There's no connection between the reporting and any sort of event or process that might have some real impact on voters' ability to form and express their preferences.

Is it all just harmless newspaper dumbitude? Not really. The trouble with myths is that they suck up all the air in the room. South Carolina becomes exclusively a tale about the dilemma of the black woman: Black candidate or female candidate? It's a relevant question, sure, but it elbows out others that are equally, perhaps more, relevant: Do black women in South Carolina have a unique set of interests that might be best served by, say, a white male candidate who supports universal single-payer health insurance? Or, to pick another myth from the Democratic side, why is the change-vs.-experience debate about two first-term senators, rather than the distinction between genuine international experience and sexually transmitted foreign-policy expertise?

There are myths with more and less substance, just as there are "issues" with more and less substance (say, whether Romney's church thinks Jesus spent spring break in Cancun* vs. Huckabee's desire for a King James version of the Constitution). But the "horse race" vs. "issues" debate tends to be binary: If something isn't about the horse race, it must be an Issue. What we seem to have been left with this year is a bunch of myth that looks like issues only by virtue of not being all horse-racy. That's a start, but it isn't much of one.

I don't mean to suggest that the current lineup of horses for each major party would have looked any different if it had been set in June, rather than at the end of January. But I do think the public agenda could have looked significantly different -- perhaps including a wider set of perspectives on health care, and almost certainly including a more substantive role for international relations (including but not limited to a bigger ongoing emphasis on Iraq, whose shrinkage on the agenda is alarming) -- if campaign reporting had rejected the culturally consonant story lines and assigned a bigger role to the so-called "second tier" of candidates. Don't say that's not our job; the effect is called "agenda-setting," and if we don't do it consciously, we're stuck with what we do unconsciously.

We're not going to get the whole thing fixed for this election cycle, but a couple of fairly easy steps could make a substantial improvement:

1) Default play for all debate stories is 30 inches, inside A, 2/3o/2, no art. That gives you enough room to report what people actually say, thus reducing the temptation for summary pugilism ledes; eliminates the risk of clueless label heds; and avoids spending space on repetitive illustration. (You can see why the HEADSUP-L consulting calendar is already full-up with cutting-edge newspapers.)
2) Stories about story lines are to be summarily spiked, no appeal.
3) Boxing, racing or other sports metaphors carry a minimum penalty of three weeks' answering the phone in sports on Friday and Saturday nights, starting 90 minutes before legal last call in the jurisdiction in question and continuing until the last bar bet is settled.
4) Writers who blame "pundits and polls" for repertorial ineptitude will sit a 90-minute exam in quantitative research methods. (Closed book, calculators allowed.)

Whayathink? Should we start a revolution?

* Your sommelier recommends Williams & Monge, "Reasoning with statistics: How to read quantitative research." Heavy enough to make an impression, light enough not to leave scars.
** Jack Lule's explanation, from "News as Myth," in Rothenbuhler & Coman's "Media Anthropology" (2005).
*** Why that's any weirder than His mom's visit to Guadalupe is a question for other travel agents.

Forbidden heds (atop good stories)

Do we need a list of permanently banned campaign heds, like unto those lists circulated every December to tamp down Christmas Came Early, 'Tis The Season and their ilk? I'm happy to nominate* "gloves come off," "come out swinging" and all cognates from the world of fisticuffs.

First, "take off gloves" is meaningless. It fails the fundamental test (especially when it's topping 1A in the lede position) of telling me why today is different from yesterday. It can apply with equal fidelity to about half of all campaign coverage, regardless of what's happened before or what is expected to happen in the future. The best that can be said of the boxing metaphor is that it fits into nearly every conceivable count. If you're stuck with a 1/42/4 on a story whose substance is the recitation of threadbare grunts and squeals on a hot August weekday before a small crowd, "Crook/Liar/take off/gloves" is there for you.

In some cases (this is one), it's also flatly wrong. When Candidate A opens by calling Candidate B a commie:

In their first head-to-head meeting of this election season, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Josh Mandel described Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown as “un-American.”
Read more »

Those pre-debate rules again

In case you need reminding:

Gloves don't come off. Gloves aren't put on. If gloves aren't worn, gloves aren't mentioned.

Nobody gets "trumped." Nobody's first name takes a determiner. For that matter, nobody's first name is used after the first reference.

There is no "storyline." There will be no zingers.

Friends don't let friends say "Real Clear Politics average."

Any questions?

Reporters without clues (or editors)

How kind of the local fishwrap to continue running exercises for editing class under the guise of local news stories:

Odds stacked against suspect in slayings after DNA test
To convince a jury he's innocent, murder suspect Xavier Chase faces tough odds: 1 in 55 quadrillion, to be exact.

Never, ever play fast and loose in court coverage. Jury trials are as literal a case as possible of we report, someone else -- that'll be the "jury" -- decides. (By the way? Suspects don't have to convince juries they're innocent. Prosecutors have to convince juries that suspects are guilty. That's -- all rise, please -- the American Way.)

That's the statistical likelihood that the DNA recovered from inside a Halloween mask found near the scene of a double homicide -- and smattered with a victim's blood -- was from Chase, 40, of Sterling Heights.

So if there's one chance in eighty bazillion that the DNA is from the suspect, what exactly is the problem again? (It's worth noting here that the reporter has no way of knowing whether the conclusions in the first two grafs are true or not. What the reporter knows ... well, let's look at the next graf and see!)

Bart Naugle, a DNA analyst with Virginia-based Bodie Technologies, testified Tuesday that Chase's DNA also was inside gloves found with the mask, which had been tossed about a block and a half north of the Warren apartment building where Chase's ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend were fatally shot last November.

Halfway through the story, some indication that something actually happened on Tuesday: A DNA expert testified about some DNA stuff. (Which is what the reporter should have noted in the first two grafs: This is stuff somebody said in testimony, not something independently known to be true. That's inexcusable deck-stacking.)

Rema Reed, 32, and Terry Buchanan, 36, were ambushed after they left Reed's apartment. Spots of Buchanan's blood were found on the Michael Myers-style Halloween mask, the outside of the gloves and the instep of Chase's shoes, Naugle testified.

Another sentence of background (which we can only hope is confirmed), another sentence of testimony, and a horror movie reference. Why bother to watch the trial?

Chase's lawyer, Tim Barkovic, has said that because the mask and gloves were put into a bag with Chase's other belongings when he was arrested, his DNA could have been transferred to the items.

So the odds aren't twelvety-zillion to one? Because the defense doesn't acknowledge (it'd be nice to know what "has said" means; doesn't sound like Tuesday) that the DNA evidence constitutes guilt? Well, that takes the fun out of things.

The trial is set to continue today.

And some more news. So strip away the attempts to play Junior G-Man and you're left with a graf of news, a graf of background, and a reminder that things would continue. In other words, a brief -- which some alert editor should have brought into being, rather than amplifying the cluelessness with the "Odds stacked against suspect" hed.

Hard to imagine doing worse in six grafs, but ... no doubt someone will try.

Peever and peeveress He created them

How are things on the Get Off My Lawn front over at The Journalist's Bible?

Q. Is it permissible (by today's rules) to start a sentence with "And"? – from Vancouver, Wash. on Thu, Nov 05, 2015

A. Yes, but avoid overusing that phrasing.

Apparently we're not going to set this one to rest without appealing to a Higher Power, so -- how about it, Creator of Heaven and Earth?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
 
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

OK, so it takes the almighty all of two verses to drop a coordinating conjunction on an independent clause. Surely He wouldn't overuse that phrasing, would He?

• And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.*
• And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
• And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
• And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
• And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
• And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Calm down, ye peevers, and notice a few things God didn't do. "It's official: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," for example. The gloves goeth not on, the gloves cometh not off, and Christmas cometh not early (though -- spoilers! -- that's a plot point in the sequel). But if your question is whether "today's rules" allow you to begin a sentence with "and," the answer is: Yes, and they have ever since "today's rules" meant Shakespeare. And you could look it up, but you (and the AP editors) probably have better stuff to do.

* I know it's traditional to number the verses, but bullets would have looked better on the PowerPoint

The AP's new clues

Here's an interesting item from this week's Ask The Editor collection at the AP Stylebook site:

I have a question about reporting poll results and the margin of error. The stylebook address a poll taken when two candidates are facing off, but I'm not exactly sure how to apply that to a ballot measure that requires a certain percentage to pass. Specifically, a poll found 51 percent of voters plan to vote against a measure, 42 percent are for it and 7 percent are unsure, with a margin of erro

And the response (the nut of it, at least; most of the response is taken up with noting that the questioner seems to have overlooked the character limit on questions):

I'll try to find out, but rpt just this sentence with the missing words ...

I don't think it's really a trick question,* or something unique to the AP. It's broader than that, and that makes it interesting, because it says something about how journalism interprets concepts like expertise and authority. "Margin of error" isn't something you can own, like Yastrzemski's batting average in 1967;** it's something you have to take an expert's word for (once you find an expert). And if you're interested in social science reporting, word choice, audience perceptions and other stuff that comes up around here at times, that's a way of understanding what things like "precise" and "credible" and "objective" mean when we apply them to news decisions.

What's the answer? Well, start with the question. The stylebook doesn't say anything about how to handle a poll "taken when two candidates are facing off" (or putting the gloves on, or taking the gloves off, or doing the horizontal hokey-pokey). It addresses how to discuss a difference between two candidates.*** There's no mention of whether that means two of two candidates or two of five candidates -- or if it's a primary with a 40% threshold, or a ballot issue ("yes" and "no" being about as two-candidate as you can get) with a 60% threshold, or anything like that, because none of those things affect what the margin of sampling error measures. So the answer is simple: Apply the same guidelines.

That doesn't mean the question is a stupid question. It suggests that the questioner doesn't know much about the domain involved (which is vastly different from being stupid). The problem is that a straightforward question ought to get a straightforward answer, and what it gets is a misleading (I'm trying hard not to say "stupid") one.

Misleading how? Because it pushes a mathematical formula that's only slightly more complicated than "earned-run average" into the domain of wizardly expertise. Journalists can't live there; we can only knock on the door, accept what we're told, and go home to see what the Times is saying. And the whole point of inferential stats is that -- as in baseball -- we all own them. We might use a batting average to support different arguments (you say a .367 average proves that power is irrelevant, and I say it fails to show that the clown doesn't hit with runners on second or third). But we're both using the same proportion, and in both cases it represents the same thing. If someone asks how to calculate batting averages if a player needs 350 plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, we have the same answer: No difference. Do all the same calculations, then go to "select cases" and include 'em out**** if PA is less than 350.

If we want to cure what ails poll reporting, and science reporting in general, that'd be a good place to start. The discussion section -- where you talk about what your statistics mean, and why they do or don't support your theory-driven predictions -- is where experts disagree (and ought to be consulted; there's nothing wrong with talking to smart people, as long as you're talking to the right people about the right stuff). The results section is a slightly more complicated version of what you've been doing since the first time you picked up a Sunday sports section and started pondering the AL Top Ten. You can play there. Any copyed, on any desk, anywhere, can own "sampling error" as thoroughly as the sports desk owns "earned-run average." And once you do, you can challenge any faulty conclusions that rely on your being too ill-informed -- or too cowed by magic -- to challenge.

Is the AP serious about "accountability journalism"? A little more aggression with undergraduate statistics would be a good place to start.


* As in "Hey, Stylebook! If a plane crashed on the border of two countries, where would you bury the survivors?" Though it's close.
** Though since you're reading this on a computer, you probably have a calculator a few clicks away, and the margin of sampling error needs maybe one more keystroke to calculate.
*** To its everlasting credit, the stylebook also notes that there is no such thing as a "statistical tie." Please heed it.
**** Should have been Berra, was probably Goldwyn. Alas.

Misspent resources

Time is a zero-sum commodity in the world of editing. At the end of your shift, you've always spent the exact amount you started with. And once you spend it, you can't get it back and start over.

So the whole split-verb thing -- nicely discussed last week in both academic and professional circles -- isn't just irritating because it tends to make for worse-sounding writing, or because it gives people a wrong impression of "rules" and what editors do and don't do with them. Time you spend unsplitting an infinitive, or a perfectly healthy auxiliary-adverb-verb sequence, is almost invariably time that doesn't get spent doing something useful.

What do the fingerprints look like? Let's turn again to the Freep, which seems obsessed with the splitter:

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton never was seriously considered, said two officials involved with the search.

Is that what the AP transmitted? Well ...

Hillary Rodham Clinton, who ran so closely to Obama in the primary, was never seriously considered, said two officials involved with the search.

So the Freep desk made a couple of style tweaks (adding the title*, deleting the "Rodham") and tightened out the relative clause (fine; I'm thinking "closely" is a hypercorrection anyway). But the "never was" -- that's a local embellishment that seems to have no justification whatsoever. (How the "seriously" escaped notice, I can't say.)

So what's the big deal? It's a little thing, but it's a little thing done in lieu of other little things, or parts of big things. In the time it took to turn "was never" into "never was," you could have ... oh, thrown a coffee cup at the person who thought it was a good idea to put "begorra" in the 1A reefer to the travel piece about Ireland.

Or should the resources that went into that change have gone into something bigger? Well, let's look at the 1A big type -- say, the deck on the top story: "Obama, Biden speeches chuck punches at McCain, GOP." Take a Google spin with "chuck a punch" and see if that looks like the right idiom to you.**

Downpage: "Ram's strength hoped to crush market woes." Makes sense if it's active, but that doesn't look like what the writer meant with "Chrysler LLC hopes for the same in the once-reliable U.S. pickup market as it launches the redesigned Dodge Ram." So we're supposed to read this as "Ram's strength is hoped to crush market woes," but can "hope" take a direct object and an infinitive? Chrysler hopes the Ram's strength to crush market woes?

So yes, a little more attention to the show-window heds would have been nice. But in an ideal world, I'd really like to see that energy go into the 6A package called "Biden has made more than a few verbal gaffes." Specifically:

"I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."

That certainly fits the story line. But Mark Liberman of the Log makes a very convincing case that it's effectively a misquote: Biden isn't saying Obama is the "first African American who is articulate," but that he's the first African American candidate and that he's articulate. Which in political and cultural terms is mind-bendingly tin-eared -- but it's not the sort of insensitivity portrayed in the quote. Mark acknowledges the blunderhood of the blunder and continues:

But there's also a linguistic and a journalistic point here. Senator Biden's word sequence corresponds to two different sentences with very different meanings, and the Observer misquoted him by omitting the comma.

I don't know whether the Observer misrepresented Biden's statement out of ignorance, carelessness, or malice. Maybe Horowitz and his editors don't know the difference between the two types of relative clauses; maybe they didn't bother to think about the difference in interpretation in this case; or maybe they know the difference in general, thought about it in this case, and decided that it would make a better story to present the wrong version.

We need to be ready for the occasional correction from the linguistics camp -- polite, sharp, kindly, blunt, whatever -- on the ignorance front. That's part of the package. But I'd rather not have anybody calling us out for carelessness or malice. Particularly when it looks like they're right.

*Since Biden and Obama were both introduced earlier without titles, I'm not convinced Clinton needs one, but ... hey, not my desk.
** Yes, I'm still tired of the gloves on/gloves off/came out swinging stuff.

Exclusive to this day

OK, it's not very charitable to call somebody's story a crock before the evidence is in, and it's impossible to prove a negative, and all that. But we're going to go ahead and speculate that if we check in on this one in six months, or six years, it's going to remain "exclusive to this day" (I think the phrase originated with Peter Braestrup but am happy to accept corrections). In other words, it isn't going to be matchable, now or then, because it's a crock.

At issue is the "'Shadow' trackers" tale, getting No. 2 play on the Fox home page this afternoon. Seems to be worth a look -- exciting turn in the war on terrorism and all that, right? Let's start with the lede:

An world-reknowned elite group of Native American trackers used by the U.S. Customs to hunt down Mexican drug and people smugglers reportedly is joining the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistan’s borders, where Usama bin Laden has been known to hide.

Nothing like getting off on the wrong indefinite article to boost your credibility. Best guess? Somebody goosed the lede by sticking in "world-renowned" and didn't bother to double-check the suturing (or the spelling). But hold that that thought while we wonder about some bigger game: Whose report produces this "reportedly" we're relying on?

The Shadow Wolves unit, recruited from tribes including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache, which patrols a 76-mile stretch of Arizona-Mexico border, is being sent to areas along the Afghan border to teach local units the traditional method called "cutting sign" of finding and following clues on the barren landscape, London's Sunday Times reported.

Wizz super! Another Murdoch product!

The Pentagon and the State Department, however, could not confirm the report the report to FOXNews.com, according to a Pentagon official. (Does anybody copyedit this stuff?)

While we had the said official on the line, we might have asked a few questions prompted by the source copy, on the order of: How do you guys go about "requisitioning" civilians who look for smugglers at the Mexican border? And what do you do by way of training before you ship 'em off to a war zone? But at least Fox gives a link we can click to read the full story, so let's:

AN ELITE group of native American trackers is joining the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistan’s borders.

Looks like that settles the question about how Fox's lede became "an world-renowned." Let's see how good the Times's attribution is, shall we? Interesting task, because as it turns out there isn't any:

In recent years, members of the Shadow Wolves have mainly tracked drug and people smugglers along the US border with Mexico.

But the Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan and the American military’s failure to hunt down Osama Bin Laden — still at large on his 50th birthday yesterday — has prompted the Pentagon to requisition them. (No attribution here.)

Robert M Gates, the US defence secretary, said last month: “If I were Osama Bin Laden, I’d keep looking over my shoulder.” (Well, I would be too -- but he isn't addressing the topic.)

The Pentagon has been alarmed at the ease with which Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters have been slipping in and out of Afghanistan. Defence officials are convinced their movements can be curtailed by the Shadow Wolves.

About this point, I'm longing to hear from one of those defence officials, under whatever cloak of anonymity he or she decires.

Some military experts want the Shadow Wolves to help to track down Bin Laden. ... But a senior US official insisted last week that Bin Laden’s trail had “not gone stone cold”.

Once again, as soon as a real person talks, he's talking about something else -- a classic shell game of sourcing. What we seem to have is a ginned-up tale about mythical figures from American fiction going after the chief evildoer, using their native wiles to help out where technology has failed.

A couple of remaining holes support that conclusion. One, the Afghan-Pak border is, oh, mildly different (topography- and climate-wise) from the Arizona-Mexico border. Two, there's already a set of Wily Native myths in play for this region. Let's let the Washington Post (November 2001) address both:

But our 12-horse team forged ahead, guided through the blinding blizzard by Afghan trackers on foot. The passengers on horseback -- three cousins in the jewelry business, a relief agency worker and three foreign journalists on their way to a war -- were hunched against the cold and the snow, beneath hoods and gloves and parkas. The Afghan guides walked alongside in tennis shoes, without gloves, wearing old army jackets and Afghan scarves.

I don't even want to ask how many words they have for "blizzard." But do you get the idea the the local trackers are not only accustomed to the weather, but already pretty fearsome? Or should we ask the Torygraph (September 2001)?

I used salt instead of toothpaste, fearing that the Afghan scouts used by the Russians would pick up the scent of Colgate.

Wow! See you an Apache and raise you a Pathan there, bubba. In other words, whatever the border/terrorist/Osama issue is, a lack of "ancestral sign-reading skills" isn't part of it. Unless, you know, bin Laden uses Gleem or something. And you'd think we would have searched his ancestral medicine cabinet by now.

Generally, there's not a lot of mileage in trying to infer motive from news copy, but the AEJMC deadline is coming up, so let's indulge. There's probably a strong corporate sense at Fox, and the other Murdoch products, that "good news" in the GWoT is, at best, given short shrift by the liberal mainstream media. So when a piece comes along that scratches that itch and lets you indulge in some comfortable cultural myths too, it's on its way to a good ride.

The piece doesn't have to be ordered in from the glass offices. In a case like this, it'd be commendable initiative for a low-ranking desk to advance the story (even with a mere phone call) and pitch it for good play. All you have to do is ignore all the warning lights and you've got a pretty good tale on your hands.

Is there a lesson in that for Fox, or for journalism in general? Sure. Ideology doesn't make a story dumb. Stupid journalistic practice makes a story dumb. Ideology just makes it easier for people who already don't like you to point out how dumb you are.

Process and substance

We don't do the Banished Words thing around here, but if you're in the mood for a few concepts you can mock on sight during the onrushing year, come on in:

I have not seen a political cycle so confounding in my lifetime, and it could continue into a year of the most historic kind. If you love politics—the excitement, the unknowability, the to-and-fro—this is the year for you. If you take unhappy U.S. political trends seriously—the shallowness, the restiveness, the division of our polity—you will feel legitimate concern.  

This is a category error in journalism that's reflected in the sort of people we award pundit status to. People who say "I'm a politics junkie" usually mean something like "I'm a campaigns junkie," and campaigning is a small -- if admittedly loud and dramatic -- part of "politics." It accounts for the bulk of political coverage in part because campaigns are contests, and journalism writes about contests very well. That's why we have sports sections, and once you know that American debates are scored more or less the same way as professional wrestling, you too can be an expert on their carefully planned spontaneity.

We do less well with policy. That requires some knowledge at a level above scorekeeping: not just whether Eye-ran is an issue, but whether the gloves actually come off when two candidates are arguing about whether to bomb Eye-ran today or give it a fair trial and bomb it in two weeks. A year in which a moderate to large portion of the electorate -- and the commenting class -- can't tell the difference between "policy" and "deranged racism" is not one made for people who love politics.

Or even those who like politics, the slow-moving, unexciting and often bureaucratic process of figuring out what to do when there isn't enough stuff to go around. It is not a sport for the dashing. (Everyone wants to be the lead guitar player; nobody wants to file the contracts and change the oil in the van.) But it is important, and if we want it done well, we can make a small contribution by not getting it mixed up with the craft of campaigning.

While we're on the subject of Peggy Noonan, let's go ahead and get a little prescriptive: No more plays on "Trump" in heds. (This isn't actually a word ban, just a reminder of the existing rule against stupid name puns in heds. No "Cruz control," no "Cruz missile" and nothing Trumps nobody, period, forever, amen.) And if columnists must review their brilliance from the previous year:

I asserted his appeal was not limited to Republicans. My highly scientific reason is that in talking to Trump supporters it often emerged that they were Democrats or independents. 

... you may remind them that it's rarely a good idea to generalize from "people who talk to Peggy Noonan" to the public at large.

Bring your own gloves

That pesky comma of direct address! Why does it give Our Nation's Tabloids such fits?

No, you can't say the comma is hidden by the subject's hair. Then I really wouldn't know whether you meant "Come, Clean Mr. Cain" or "Come Clean, Mr. Cain."

Today in constructivism

Common cold cured! Fractious Near East at peace! And our second-most-important story of the day at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network is ... can we zoom in on the lower left there? That's better:

A panel at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism comparing the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements was stacked with liberal journalists who offered one-sided conclusions, according to one alumnus who attended the event.

Panelists at the event, which was held on Oct. 1 in the prestigious school’s Pulitzer Hall, made “little attempt to hide their sympathies” to the Occupy movement, author Harry Stein wrote in City Journal, a quarterly magazine published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Or, to take another whack at the hed: Guy in Audience Still Whining About Something Panel Discussion 10 Days Ago Wasn't About. (The announced topic of the event, after all, was coverage of social movements, not "comparing" two movements.) Given the throngs that normally pitch tents ahead of time for panel discussions on Monday nights at journalism schools, you can be forgiven for marveling at this one's rise to the top of the national news agenda.

To its credit, Fox does produce a candidate for no-comment of the year, from the panel's moderator, Todd Gitlin:*

“You have nothing to do with news,” Gitlin said. “And you’re wasting my time.”

He's half right. His time was being wasted, but other than that, the story's a pretty sharp illustration of how much Fox really does have to do with news. Columbia may be "no longer Joseph Pulitzer's school," to borrow the whiner's title, but Fox went to the Charles F. Kane school of journalism, and that's alive and well.

Journalism tends to have a pragmatic and fairly scornful reaction to ideas like constructivism. We deal with the real world, after all, and we deal with it quickly, accurately, and without fear or favor, and that's all ye need to know. The idea that news is a constructed commodity that presents socially appropriate conclusions about constructed realities -- often quite well, and often at some physical and social risk to the people doing the work -- doesn't draw a lot of water. But it's the way Fox manages to sneak onto the track and look, at a casual glance, a lot like real journalism.


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Really stupid stuff you shouldn't do with polls

Q: What's worse than writing a bogus poll story because it fits a sports narrative?
A: Writing a bogus poll story because it fits the party line!

I think we've discussed this point before, but one way you can distinguish the professional press from the party press is that the professionals screw up survey reporting evenhandedly. If the New York Times decides to round all its confidence intervals to the nearest whole percentage point, that's a dumb decision, but it applies with equal dumbness to all results -- not just ones the Times allegedly likes or dislikes. Similarly, horse-race writers will write about who purportedly clawed whose way back into contention after the candidates traded jabs when the gloves came off, regardless of how the paper's endorsement is going to go. The horse race is a silly narrative, but it usually operates independently of party alignment.

The party press is a different creature. (I'm fond of this example from 2008, in which a 3-point lead* is "Within Margin Of Error" when the Kenyan Muslim usurper is ahead but "McCain Out Front" when the home team is winning.) Its goal is to tell the audience what ought to be happening. And the risk with letting your wishes influence your results -- trying to be objective here, kids -- is not just deluding the general-purpose viewer but deluding the paymaster. If anybody deserves a clear-eyed account of the Massachusetts Senate race, it's the American side -- right, Fair 'n' Balanced Network?

The Senate race is Massachusetts is deadlocked heading into the final weeks** – again challenging the assumption that a little-known Republican cannot win national office in such a heavily Democrat state.

There are no values of "deadlocked" for which this is true -- at least, not on any evidence the story presents, or any evidence from the lone specific source the story cites. Above is Real Clear Politics' summary of the four most recent polls in the Gomez-Markey race. In the two latest, the Democrat has a 7-point lead; with a sample of 500 in each case, that means a "margin of error" of 4.4 points at your standard 95 percent confidence. If Fox News tells you that's an even bet, Fox News had better hope it gets to the county line before you and your friends with the tar and feathers do.***

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And it tasted like chicken

Just a reminder, as useful for natural disasters as it is for campaign coverage: If it's the first thing that comes to mind, lie down and wait for a second thing to come to mind.

Headlines shouldn't be a drinking game. Storms don't have to sound like freight trains. Unfamiliar parts of nonnative reptiles don't have to taste like chicken. You don't have to say "establishment lane" or "Granite State" or "gloves came off" -- let alone "Real Clear Politics average." Think of the children.

Look at the nameplate, please

In the Good Old Days, you could at least expect the people who wrote the headlines to have read the morning's* paper before showing up for work. Thus, they'd know not just the specifics (whether the leader of Freedonia was a "president" or a "dictator") but the broad details that enabled success in the journalism business: a mere glance at the top of the front page could tell you not only what year it was, but which fount of knowledge (in which city) you were supposed to arrive at for the day's labor. So, for the folks downtown who thought all this would magically show up on their phones, a few reminders:

• This state is called "Michigan"
• This month is called "January"
• "Winter" technically began three weeks ago
• Granted, I'm kind of the new guy (this is my ninth winter here**), but preliminary observation is starting to suggest that nobody even thinks of putting those snow shovels away before they put their damn tomatoes in. Sheez

It's early days in a presidential election year; we could be looking at another 10 months of "X Trumps Y," notwithstanding all the times the gloves will come off or go on during the primary season. Let's try to avoid closing the Stupidest Headline competition before most j-schools even start classes, shall we?

^ Or the previous day's; the majority of American dailies were pyems into the late 1990s. Weekday morning circulation didn't exceed weekday afternoon circulation until the early 1980s.
** Though Language Czarina and her mom were both born in Detroit proper.

Stop making stuff up!

We've com- plained a lot in the past few weeks about inter- changeable heds: the ones you could (and often do) put on any story without regard for whether GLOVES COME OFF! or MAKE OR BREAK! reflects any actual development in the story atop which it appears.

Today's example is a little different. "Polls: Ohio, Texas races tighten" looks as if it was just pulled out of the bag of day-before-the-primary heds, but it has a singular disadvantage: It isn't true. Or, put more roundaboutly, of several things you could reasonably conclude from current survey data, "these two races are tightening" isn't any of them. So before we get into the gory statistical details, a couple of suggestions, in case anyone wants to listen:

1) When you write a hed, make sure you can (a) place a finger on the fact statement in the text that corresponds to the hed and (b) confirm the fact in line with prevailing standards.

2) Don't write a flawed or overdramatized hed because a designer painted you into a corner. If the story doesn't have the hed specifications for the hed it needs, demand spex that conform to the story. Don't make the story fit the spex.

3) If you're going to generalize from samples to populations (and whether you like it or not, that's what every poll story since Caesar's "Gallic Wars" has done), learn the rules, all right? You don't have to know many, but you have to know them, and you have to be ruthless in editing stories that violate them for whatever reason. Honest. If sports writers treated their data as badly as we treat ours, the peasants would be at the gates.

Back to our hed. For it to be true, two things have to be true: Polls have to have tightened in Ohio, and they have to have tightened in Texas. Did they? Let's take a look. For context, let's use what the paper reported Saturday. Remember, the present tense in heds ("tighten") signals the event in the immediate past that tells you why today is different from yesterday -- the "why am I reading this?" development:
Polls now give her a modest lead in Ohio and show Texas is a toss-up, but earlier she had large leads in both states. (AP)

and inside Monday (reefered from the package shown above):
The race is close; a Mason-Dixon poll for the Cleveland Plain Dealer released on Sunday put Clinton ahead by four points, 47-43 percent, with an error margin of four points and 9 percent undecided. (Philly Inquirer)

So in the Mason-Dixon poll (in the field Feb. 27-29, interviewing 625 likely voters), Clinton leads in Ohio, but the lead isn't significant at conventional levels of confidence.* What has happened since? Let's have a look at the compilation at RealClearPolitics (which, if you discount the thoroughly bogus "RCP average," is a good one-stop site for data). Four polls of likely voters began at the weekend: SurveyUSA (n=873; Clinton 54, Obama 44), Public Policy Polling (n=1,112; Clinton 51, Obama 42) and Suffolk (n=400; Clinton 52, Obama 40), all in the field Saturday and Sunday, and Rasmussen (n=858; Clinton 50, Obama 44), which polled Sunday only. In the first three, Clinton's lead is significant at 95% confidence, meaning there aren't any non-chance cases in which Obama could be leading. In Rasmussen, Clinton's lead isn't significant, but it's larger than the difference in the Mason-Dixon poll.

So what does it all mean? It could mean everything's pretty stable. Random samples from a normal distribution will eventually form a normal distribution themselves, so the data could mean Clinton's support in the whole population (likely Democratic voters in Ohio) has been steady at, oh, 48 to Obama's steady 43. Or, given that most of the most recent surveys show a significant Clinton lead, Clinton's support could be growing. The one thing you can't get out of these data is that the race is tightening. It may be, for any of several reasons ("undecided" being a rather important one). But it isn't something that the polls show, meaning the hed is false.**

Are the later polls better? Well, you can say with a high level of confidence that they're later. Most of them have larger samples than Mason-Dixon (meaning tighter confidence intervals). They're also in the field at the weekend only and for shorter time periods, introducing other possible sources of error we can't quantify. If that tells you anything about survey data on voter intentions, it should be that the things that make polls interesting also make them very difficult to draw confident predictions from. That doesn't mean polls are unreliable; it means the things that limit their reliability need to be taken into account.

And Texas? Look for yourself. Those results are only tightening if -- oh, if you're a hed writer who has to say something novel about the primaries and knows there's no penalty for inventing a few conclusions from data you haven't seen. Ahem.

It'd be nice if we didn't have to return to this subject every few weeks, but Some People are Not Paying Attention. The polls are getting a lot of stick in this campaign season, and that's not fair. The polls are performing exactly the way they're supposed to. The fault is with people -- pollsters, candidates, "experts," reporters -- who decide to put lipstick on an otherwise fully functional data pig and parade it around to demonstrate their indispensable wisdom. You can't spell Marketplace of Ideas without "marketing." At least, not very well.

* Though it would be at 68% confidence! How many times do we have to repeat this? The margin of sampling error is meaningless without its confidence level.
** Clinton's complaints about unfair press coverage are silly to the point of being delusional. But if she wanted to complain that this hed gave a false opinion about her campaign, she'd be right.

The magic of framing

Buffy from Farmington Hills writes:

Dear HEADSUP-L: This "framing" sounds like an awesome magic tool in the right hands. I sure hope nobody ever uses their his or her framing powers for evil ends! Because that would be like in that movie? When they were fighting? With wands? On the table? In the cafeteria? Except people would go through life with these confusing ...

Thanks for writing, Buffy. I'm sorry to tell you that some people do use their framing powers to advance their own unholy agendas. And the result is exactly what you predicted. The villagers' minds are clouded. They get correlations confused with causes. They march up to the castle and leave their habeas corpuses in the moat, because it's a mean, scary world* out there.

Here's what can happen. The nice wizard "Al" at the Poynter Institute saw a frame in a great big newspaper and hurried to tell his friends all about it. But it was a clever trap set by orcs! So this is what Al told his friends:

Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs as they are called in Iraq, pose a larger risk in the United States than you might think.

And all his friends were very scared and ran right to the elvish polling places and voted for the Party of Orcs and Balrogs Lincoln two, maybe three times each. When they found out, they fed Al to piping plovers. All because Al didn't check the frame for suspicious wires and lights before he shared it!

Safety first, kids. Wear eye protection and gloves when you're using any media effects theory, and never borrow other people's frames unless you read the label carefully. Remember what happened to Al.

*This is actually a whole nother theory, so put it back when you're done, OK?

Periodic diversity rant: Soccer winos

Let's talk about something other than polling for a bit. Let's talk about diversity. And let's start by suggesting that diversity isn't measured by how many seminars you force your staff to attend, or how many mug shots of women you run in your A section, or how many faux-etymological memos you send out about the meanings of "refugee" and "evacuee." Diversity is a function of what you talk about, whom you talk to about it, and what you say. And featurizing is often an unfortunately direct indication of those things:

Big chill tonight and Saturday
Season's coldest temperatures so far are looming
Be sure to pack the extra blankets and gloves if you're headed to a Friday night high school football game or Saturday morning youth soccer match.

It will be very chilly.

Possibly the coldest temperatures so far this season are looming overnight, as a cold high pressure system builds over the region.

Not much interest among the spires uptown in ... oh, people whose houses aren't very well insulated, one supposes. Or who can't turn the heat up because most of the check is already gone.

It will be very cold Saturday morning for parents and children involved in youth soccer leagues, and sunshine will only slowly warm temperatures during the day.

But nice and warm for winos! And people who go outside and work for a living on weekends! When you address your audience in the second person, you're telling me a lot about the sort of readers you want. Usually, you're telling me even more about the sort you don't.

(File "Big chill" with "It's official," while we're at it, and issue another reminder about the number of times you can say "very" in one weather short.)

Before we leave, enjoy this early breakaway candidate for Sentence of the Month (underlined below, as it needs a bit of a setup):

Could there be anything cooler than young people devoting their time to a righteous cause, or a fallen friend?

Yes.

Check out what Name Withheld helped pull off Saturday afternoon at the Parents Day football game at Presbyterian College in Clinton, S.C. ... Rather than protesting the war in Iraq or the cafeteria food on campus, several hundred fans left the stands and walked around the track to honor cancer survivors.

That's right, girls! Don't worry your pretty little heads about those pesky international relations! Dean Wormer will look into that as soon as the Omegas take care of the Deltas.

Pretty much anybody can liken a war to cafeteria food, after all. But to belittle a gesture of genuine decency in the process -- dude, that's writing!

How the other half lives

You might indeed have awakened on some planet with twelve ammonia-fueled suns, whereon the feckless Kenyan's handshake with the murderous dictator of Cuba was dwarfed only by the "international incident" he and his friends created with somebody's iPhone:

Call it the selfie seen 'round the world.

No, don't. Has no one at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network even heard of the list of Forbidden Ledes?

Among the enduring images from Nelson Mandela's massive memorial service in Johannesburg Tuesday will be one of a jovial President Obama taking a cell phone pic with his seat-mates, Denmark's Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Britain's David Cameron.

As the three of them smile for the camera, a stern-looking Michelle Obama can be seen staring straight ahead, hands clasped. As if to remind anyone who sees this photo years from now that it was, after all, a memorial service for one of the great human rights leaders.

More about that in a minute, because we're skating up to the point at which the goofy theoretical stuff actually starts to explain the practical stuff fairly well. But first, this:

The tsk-tsk-ing could be heard across continents.
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