538 Sacrifices Integrity to Go After Sanders on Independents
by Jim Naureckas
I used to be an admirer of Nate Silver and his empirical approach to covering elections. Not that the horserace ought to be the center of campaign journalism, but since media are going to focus on predicting who’s going to win, it seemed like Silver was approaching it as public opinion research rather than tea-leaf reading. When he left his perch at the New York Times to launch 538 as a freestanding enterprise, I wished him well in his pursuit of journalism that was based on testable information rather than on the opinions of powerful people.
My first hint that all was not right in Silverland was when he confidently declared, despite Donald Trump’s high poll ratings in 2015, that he would not be the Republican nominee (538, 8/11/15): “Our emphatic prediction is simply that Trump will not win the nomination.” Polling more than a year before the election famously doesn’t mean much, but this is a reason to not make predictions, not to predict that the opposite of the polls will happen. But not making predictions is hard to do if you’re in the prediction business, and so in the absence of useful data Silver and his crew substituted their own punditry–with embarrassing results.
As this campaign has gone along, it seems to me that the 538 crew have at times gone beyond the realm of punditry into the realm of hackery—that is, not just treating their own opinions as though they were objective data, but spinning the data so that it conforms to their opinions.
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http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/05/29/538-sacrifices-integrity-go-after-sanders-independents
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Overtly so.
