538’s Nate Silver Dings Media for Clinton Election Coverage

By Don Irvine.

 

Nate Silver took a couple of swipes at the media on his FiveThirtyEight podcast — including his former employer, the New York Times — for screwing up the coverage of the 2016 election by creating a false narrative on Hillary Clinton.

The main topic of the podcast was on Clinton’s new book, What Happened, in which she explains why she thought she lost the election.

I’m pretty invested in the idea that people fundamentally misunderstand many things about the 2016 campaign and that a lot of the reason misunderstand is that some of the same people in the press who screwed up the coverage of the election itself now have incentives kind of whitewash the reasons that Clinton lost and the relative weight of them, because there are a lot of reasons.

The weighting and the kind of collective memory on eighth avenue where this news organization  (New York Times) is for example Their collective memory and the kind of narrative that they tell about the election is not grounded in the reality of the election as much as it should be if you’re the paper of record for example.

Silver isn’t completely innocent either, as his website predicted Hillary had a 72 percent chance of winning the White House.

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