I agree with this article's conclusion in Silver's case, but I think for different reasons. I think the journalistic epistemology it dismisses is actually a good one, but is not being demonstrated in the attacks on Nate Silver. Long-form, long-lead-time investigative journalism is perhaps where it's best demonstrated, and in that case blends somewhat into the epistemology used by anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers: the idea that to understand a situation or culture you need to spend considerable time with it, observing how it works, how the people there think and act, etc., even being yourself embedded in it for a time. But you have to actually do it, which takes considerable work and usually long periods of time, and TV pundits are not. And it's better for some things than others: ethnographers rarely claim that their expertise is in predicting the outcome of elections. If you want to predict something, especially something numerical, an ethnographer would generally say that you're asking the wrong person for that prediction, and should go ask a statistician. That might be one difference with journalists: journalists have less humility about the conclusions they can draw.
I don't think that can always be replaced by just data-crunching, in part because you just move the same problem to the 2nd-order problem of interpretive frames for data, which requires the same in-depth ethnographic field work to get right. The proper balance is a big debate in qualitative vs. quantitative sociology, though.
I do think that when it comes to predicting the outcome of elections, on the other hand, the decision is not hard, because it's almost a best case of a prediction that can be quantified based on available data. So I'd say this is more an issue of punditry vs. careful methodology (of any kind), rather than qualitative vs. quantitative epistemologies. In this specific case, it's mainly just partisanship: some people don't like that Silver's data shows Obama with an ~80% chance of winning, so plug their ears.
I'd agree with that. For the elections, it's hard to rev up the base when someone points to the numbers and says you have a poor chance of winning. Rove has an editorial at the WSJ right now that's their #1 article, about how Romney has good chances to win; it feels similar to how in 2006 he claimed to have "the math" before the Republicans got their drubbing. It's almost like putting out a big name editorial like that is the last "get the base out to vote" attempt before the election, regardless of what the actual odds are. Problem is having someone like Silver running numbers in a clearly explained way that anyone can replicate, with a high measure of past accuracy, serves to debunk the efforts of people like Rove almost by default.
This is an important point. Elections follow similar patterns every cycle, including much bravado. Silver totally disrupts that with data--it's not just the punditry that is angry with him, it's political operatives. He's pulling the curtain back and revealing the "wizard of Oz", so to speak.
If you really want to know which side feels less-than-confident about their chances, the best indicator is "leaks" from campaign insiders that talk about the candidates' future plans. Laying the groundwork early is an irresistible urge for those who think they might be in trouble.
> In this specific case, it's mainly just partisanship: some people don't like that Silver's data shows Obama with an ~80% chance of winning, so plug their ears.
News flash: It's no secret that the news media (except for Fox) has a distinct Democratic tilt. I agree with your premise that journalists are closet partisans, but I disagree that they'd be upset at an analysis that favors Obama for partisan reasons.
Honest Q that I hope won't sound too partisan: I think it's pretty accurate that most members of the news media tilt to the Democratic side -- although I think they tend to be much more in the Clinton model rather than the Kucinich model, which is to say about what would have been considered moderate Republican in the 60s (socially fairly liberal but economically rather lassez-faire, save for a few fairly stock Democratic positions like being pro-union).
However, that doesn't necessarily mean the actual news stories are biased. There may be tilts in the sense that, say, a Keynesian and a Hayekian might sincerely intend to write the same story objectively but still reveal a bit of bias in the finished result -- but isn't that qualitatively different from the kind of editorializing we see on Fox (and, since they decided that counter-programming Fox was their ticket to success, MSNBC)?
Michelle Malkin, Jonah Goldberg, David Brooks (debatable), Charles Krauthammer
talk show: Glenn Beck? Rush Limbaugh? Pat Buchanan is on the communist PBS show McLaughlin Group.
Colbert isn't a journalist, but talk radio is 99% conservative or if not outright conservative then advocating "common sense"-y solutions that somehow always come out conservative.
Joe Scarborough quite literally is a republican (6 years in the house from FL-1) and runs three (I think) hours of coverage every morning on the "most liberal" of the cable networks. The whole notion of the "liberal media" as a unified force is itself a creation of the decidedly conservative wing of the media dominated by News Corp. MSNBC has a bunch of coverage that slants left. Fox is actually run by republican partisans. Yet it's the people on the right who complain the loudest, and the reason is precicely that they have their own partisan media to push the message.
Well, yes. So the comment is essentially "journalists lean Democratic if you ignore a huge concentration of Republicans". Which is not much of a statement at all.
On the subject of actual newsroom expenses: Pew Research Center for Excellence in Journalism has an interesting piece on the budgets of major cable news networks. [1]
These charts (from [1] and [2]) are particularly interesting:
In short, when compared to CNN: despite operating few domestic and foreign bureaus, Fox News pulled in more revenue and had nearly as large an audience (as measured by viewers tuning in for 60 minutes or more monthly). Fox also allocates over 70% of its budget to "program expenses" (including salaries for its hosts), whereas CNN's program expenses are about 44%. The difference in staffing figures are also drastic: ~4000 for CNN, 1272 for Fox.
> I think the journalistic epistemology it dismisses is actually a good one
I disagree with this. Basically, the journalistic "epistemology" the article describes is that journalists get access to information the rest of us can't see, so we have to take their word for whatever they say about it. That doesn't seem like a good thing to me. I don't want journalists, or anybody else, to pre-digest my information for me. I want to see the raw data. If they want to show me their spin on the data in a separate article, that's OK, but if I can't see the actual data they base their spin on, I don't trust their conclusions.
I don't think that can always be replaced by just data-crunching, in part because you just move the same problem to the 2nd-order problem of interpretive frames for data, which requires the same in-depth ethnographic field work to get right. The proper balance is a big debate in qualitative vs. quantitative sociology, though.
I do think that when it comes to predicting the outcome of elections, on the other hand, the decision is not hard, because it's almost a best case of a prediction that can be quantified based on available data. So I'd say this is more an issue of punditry vs. careful methodology (of any kind), rather than qualitative vs. quantitative epistemologies. In this specific case, it's mainly just partisanship: some people don't like that Silver's data shows Obama with an ~80% chance of winning, so plug their ears.