So what was all that bullshit back there?
Everyone who’s in the prediction and forecasting business gets something wrong at some point. One good way to figure out who you can trust is to look at how they react when they do get something wrong.
If you get a prediction wrong and own it and try to figure out why you got it wrong, so you can get better with future predictions, then you’re probably an honest broker. But if you’re proven wrong and it just motivates you to double down on the things you’re proven wrong about, or if you try to distract audiences from the fact that you were wrong, then you probably weren’t even trying to get it right to begin with.
This brings us to the November 2023 elections last night. The entire media spent the previous month not only insisting that the Democrats would do poorly, but that it would be further proof that the Democrats were supposedly doomed in 2024. But the actual numbers and demographics and trends all along suggested that the Democrats were going to do well last night. So who in the media was just being lazy and clueless, and who in the media was getting it wrong on purpose for effect?
Today we saw the New York Times claim that last night’s big wins for the Democrats mean they’re still doomed in 2024. Well wait a minute. If the New York Times’ position was that the Democrats are going to do poorly last night and it was going to prove that they were doomed in 2024, then why is it suddenly irrelevant that they did well last night? If 2023 is irrelevant to 2024, then why was 2023 being held up as being important until it went the way the media wasn’t predicting?
Today we also saw Andrea Mitchell use her MSNBC time slot to continue hyping the narrative that voters have given up on Joe Biden. She’s still citing the handful of recent polls that have Trump ahead of Biden in 2024 as the basis for this. It was disingenuous enough that she (and so many others) were ignoring the fact that Biden is ahead of Trump in the majority of recent polls. You’d think that last night’s big wins for Biden’s Democratic Party would force a reevaluation of which polls might be the most accurate. But instead Mitchell doubled down on her faulty positions even after last night proved those positions to be faulty.
On a somewhat brighter note, Nicolle Wallace used her MSNBC time slot to acknowledge that the entire industry got it wrong by predicting doom for the Democrats. I’d like her to have gone further and actually admit that the entire industry willfully got it wrong by cherry picking individual polls that said the opposite of what the majority of the polls said. But at least she admitted that the entire media got it wrong, instead of trying to pretend the media had it right.
Still, it’s bothersome to see that even the “best” people in the political journalism and punditry industry are still repeating the same old pattern. They decide in advance which storyline is going to get the most ratings, and then they all hype that particular storyline no matter how unlikely or unrealistic it is. Then when the obvious thing happens that was always going to happen, they spin that obvious thing as if it were some surprising result.
Here’s hoping that this industry finds a way to reach a point where the more insightful people in the industry are willing to simply say “Here’s the boring thing that’s actually going to happen,” instead of just going along with hyping the ridiculous ratings-driven predictions that the rest of the industry is hyping.
Politics is an arena where a lot things tend to have a 50-50 chance of happening, and therefore a monkey flipping a coin could predict things correctly about half the time. Yet the vast majority of the political journalism and punditry industry tends to get the vast majority of its predictions wrong. It’s not possible for this entire industry to be this incompetent. This is a matter of the entire industry willfully getting its predictions wrong, on purpose, in order to manufacture controversy and stir up doom and keep ratings high, and using each other for cover along the way.
Days like today are a good reminder that the Republicans are just the villains. The political media’s nonstop lies, misleading narratives, and ratings driven false stories are our actual opponent. We face off against the Republicans once a year on election day. We have to face off against the media’s lies every single day if we want to truly win political battles on an ongoing basis.
