Keeping the election in context

One thing journalists don't do enough of it put events into context. You can throw facts at the audience all you want, but to really tell the story, you have to tell them what those facts mean. Brendan Nyhan discusses what the media did wrong on this front in a piece in the Huffington Post. He covers both sides well.

One problem seems to be that it's too easy to analyze statistics. You can make statistics back up just about any point. But what people often forget is that correlation not the same as causation. Here's one example from Nyhan's story:

Under the headline "Crushed," Josh Marshall noted that "Of the 39 Dems who voted against Health Care Reform, 12 are going to be returning in the next Congress," suggesting that opposition to reform was a cause of these members' defeats. However, he failed to note that most of anti-HCR members represented competitive districts and that vulnerable Democrats who opposed reform appeared to perform somewhat better than their pro-HCR counterparts.