Nate Silver: News Punditry is Fundamentally Useless!

Dear Commons Community,

Nate Silver, the New York Times polling master, hammered members of the media on Wednesday night.  Politico’s Mike Allen reported that Silver appeared at Google’s Washington D.C. headquarters as part of the company’s Talk series. ABC News’ Jonathan Karl interviewed Silver, who spoke about working for the Times and the differences between journalism and punditry.

“I don’t want to totally lump reporters and pundits in together,” Silver said. “It’s kind of venial sins versus cardinal sins basically … 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.”

By the way, I have just finished reading Silver’s The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don’t.  It is well worth the read.

Tony

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