Brendan Nyhan at the Columbia Journalism Review tries to dampen the hype:
So far, there has been less hype about the power of the bully pulpit than usual—The Washington Post even ran a story today headlined “Impact of State of Union speeches isn’t very lasting.” But the stakes are lower than the media’s overwrought phrasing often suggests. Politico’s Glenn Thrush wrote yesterday, for instance, that “If Americans perceive Obama as too partisan, he’ll lose a serious share of his personal popularity.” In reality, however, Obama isn’t likely to significantly increase his approvalor significantly reduce it. And even if he did make a major blunder, we wouldn’t know it from the ill-conceived instant polls of speech watchers that tend to shape reporting and punditry in the aftermath of the State of the Union. Here’s hoping some media outlets take a better approach in 2013 so this column doesn’t become an annual tradition.
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