NY Times’ Nate Silver: ‘Punditry Is Fundamentally Useless’

The New York Times‘ Nate Silver — of FiveThirtyEight fame — was interviewed as part of Google’s D.C. Talks series, during which he remarked on political reporting and punditry. The latter, he told Jonathan Karl, “is fundamentally useless.”

The statistician provided his take on some of the biases that exist within the media. As reported by POLITICO’s Mike Allen:

“Whenever the term ‘momentum’ is used, that’s a good sign that the media is being biased, right? They’re talking about some tangible concept to assert that more is happening than really is happening. … I think you … have a lot people who are maybe liberal … who are terrified of being perceived as liberal, and so they maybe overcompensate in different ways. … [I]f you write for The Times, you’re carrying both the prestige of that brand and also some of the associations that go with it, positive and negative. But also you are a representative of something apart from you.”

While the Times “does give its people a fair amount of voice,” he said, there is some potential self-censoring. That’s where Twitter comes in:

“But there are also things you might write on the blog where you feel really good about something and … it creates a spark and then it doesn’t really benefit your brand in the end. Plus, there’s always Twitter to get, like, sarcastic little remarks in here and there. So … my outlet is Twitter to have a different kind of personality.”

Silver went on to draw a distinction between reporters and pundits, arguing that the latter are essentially not providing anything useful:

“I don’t want to totally lump reporters and pundits in together, right? It’s kind of venial sins versus cardinal sins basically — right? — where reporting is very, very important and journalism is very, very important, and there are some things about campaign coverage that I might critique. Whereas punditry is fundamentally useless.”

While opinions on punditry are sure to vary, Silver and his predictions arguably are not wholly exempt from being classified as contributions to punditry. His role in this past election being an example.

(h/t POLITICO)