When it comes to news about the 2012 presidential race, it can be hard to know what to believe. Every day, it seems, the headlines tell a different story. Some headlines focus on an upstart candidate and his or her chance to win the Republican nomination. Others focus on why this candidate can’t possibly win. Other headlines focus on frontrunners. One day, the headlines will focus on his success in fundraising or debates. A few days later, headlines from the same organization will focus on whether the candidate is really electable. And many headlines focus on the current president, with many different views expressed about his reelection prospects.

In this brief posting, I want to help you interpret these messages. In particular, I want to explain how they are produced and give you a sense of their accuracy.

The headlines and stories that most people hear about the presidential race come from the news media. News organizations do a great service for the American public by providing information about people who want to be president. At the same time, their competitive incentives lead many of them to sensationalize every aspect of the campaign and to do so in different ways on a daily basis.

Today, the competition amongst news outlets is greater than ever. Broadcast news programs and traditional newspapers compete with cable news networks who compete with news websites and high profile blogs for the attention of the American public. Many news organizations have strong financial incentives to draw viewers attention every single day, if not every hour or every minute of every day. For many outlets, more attention corresponds to more advertising dollars which leads to greater profits for the companies that produce the news. Billions of dollars are at stake.

This level of competition is worth thinking about when trying to interpret the media’s coverage of the presidential race. News outlets are under great pressure to get people to pay attention to them. For many people in the news industry, they gain more from getting a larger audience than they do from saying things that are correct. As a result, much attention is put into creating exciting new headlines every day and very few people are fired for saying things that are incorrect. In many cases, volume and sensationalism matter. Accuracy matters less.

So, every day on the cable news networks and on news websites, prognosticators make bold claims about who will win the Republican nomination and whether Barack Obama will be reelected. They will be rewarded for making these claims in an exciting way. They will not be held accountable for making incorrect predictions about who will win the Republican nomination or the presidential election next year.

To provide but one example, think about the presidential election headlines from just four years ago, in November of 2007. On the Republican side, many outlets were abuzz about Mike Huckabee’s surge and Fred Thompson’s arrival as a candidate. Rudy Giuliani was the frontrunner with Mitt Romney also jockeying for position amongst the top tier of candidates. John McCain’s name recognition was high, but his campaign was in tatters with many of his senior campaign staff having resigned over the previous summer. For most pundits on most days four years ago, McCain did not stand a chance. On the Democratic side, a Gallup poll taken on Nov. 11-14, 2007, showed 48 percent of Democrats supporting Hillary Clinton and only 21 percent supporting Barack Obama. This poll confirmed what most pundits knew four years ago – that Clinton would be the Democratic nominee. Seen four years later, most headlines from November 2007 now look very silly.

While the election is still months away, news organizations need to draw viewers every single day. Hence, we can expect a steady diet of sensational headlines about who is going to win and who is on their way out. But like four years ago, many people who produce these headlines are rewarded for getting us to watch them, not for being correct. If you follow today’s headlines with that idea in mind, then a rule for how to think of these claims follows automatically – “for entertainment purposes only.”