Data diver Nate Silver, who became famous helping the New York Times predict election results before going independent, has slammed the newspaper for its “dishonest” criticism of his failure in the 2016 race to call everything right, like Donald Trump’s rise.
In a podcast reviewed by the Columbia Journalism Review, Silver, who heads the popular FiveThirtyEight site, rapped the paper and media critic Jim Rutenberg.
“This is someone who, by the way, doesn’t talk about that we were colleagues together at The New York Times, a person who cherrypicks the facts he’s looking at. So he mentions that in our Indiana prediction for the Democrat election, the underdog won [i.e., Sanders over Clinton], but in fact the favorite has won 51 of 56 times in our polls-only forecast. To me, that’s dishonest and unethical, frankly. And he doesn’t really take the time to truly understand what’s going on,” quoted CJR.
Rutenberg had rightly criticized the media’s inability to correctly predict the race so far, mentioning the Times and Silver’s group.
But Silver appeared to take it personally, recalling how during the 2012 race, Times people gave his team the cold shoulder, showing a preference for old school journalism over the new data-reporting hybrid.
CJR transcribed this:
“Jim Rutenberg and I were colleagues in 2012 when FiveThirtyEight was part of The New York Times. They were incredibly hostile and incredibly unhelpful to FiveThirtyEight, particularly when FiveThirtyEight tried to do things that blended reporting with kinda more classic techniques of data journalism. When we went to New Hampshire, for example, to go to The New York Times filing center … the political desk is literally giving us the cold shoulder like it’s some high school lunchroom.
“This happened, right? When we filed the story pointing out before anyone else at the time … that Rick Santorum had probably won the Iowa caucus and that was a story that involved a combination of data work and reporting … they were apoplectic, because their Romney sources were upset and their Iowa GOP sources were upset, so a story that, no. 1, was a perfect blend of reporting, which is what Rutenberg claims we need, with data, and, no. 2, got things totally right, pissed them off because they were mad they didn’t get the scoop and it went against what their sources wanted. I mean, this guy was extremely unhelpful.”
See the whole post and Rutenberg’s reaction here.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
