Nate Silver ("Blogger for Times") joining ESPN

I took that more as a reference to its status during the election, although I guess the sentence is written in the present tense.

 

What do we think of her pulling the 'I'm the executive editor" on the poor shlub trying to set up for an event?

I suppose, that as the boss, it's her prerogative, but it sounded like she could have handled it better.

 

I concur 100 percent. That was bad. But it was precisely how she comes off whenever I see her on "Morning Joe."

 

But what about writing the perfect country and western song?

 

In every conversation about Silver, the Times seems to be woefully out-of-touch to the fact that the paradigm has changed for someone like Silver. The paper needed Silver more than he needed it. It did not give him a significant bump in credibility, it was the other way around, at least as far as the audience was concerned. Nothing Silver did with the Times boosted his credibility as a statistician. He just happened to have his website run through a portal connected to the Times website during the last election. The Times got significantly more readers, and Silver was compensated. As Don Draper once quipped, "That's what the money is for." Silver knows his brand can and will travel, and the Times seems to think he should have stuck around for less money, in an environment where co-workers were occasionally hostile about his celebrity and his methods, because of some mythical credibility boost he gets from the 161-year rep of The Grey Lady.

All this said, one thing that I think doesn't get brought up enough in discussing Silver is that the statistical modeling approach has its limitations as well, at least as a public service. Horse-race politics is often used pejoratively to describe Silver's detractors, but an entire model that relies on polling and economic data to give you an accurate picture of the electorate is, in some respects, just the most accurate form of horse race politics.

This is where I suspect some of the Times royal class of political reporters, many of whom believe (deep down) they are pseudo-public servants whose job it is to explain policy and help educate the voter, were so angry about his rise. Silver can explain things, and he often does it well, but he got famous because he was good at predicting things. I suspect the Times reporters who disliked him so imagine themselves as the last honorable guardians of the truth and insight in the media. And there is some evidence to support that, like the China reporting highlighted in the Abramson piece. But there is also a lot of stenography, and process bullshit, and hyperventilating over inconsequential gaffes that have diminished any high ground the Times might have had on this point.

 

It's definitely controversial. Without it, we wouldn't have had Karl Rove on election night. I choose not to think of such a world.

But there are plenty of people who still think Silver just got lucky. They're dumb, but they think that.

 

More prevalent are those who think he influences the voting, right? So if Nate Silver says that Pennsylvania is going to Obama, other outlets report that, and then voters, who love a winner, fall in line.