The Crisis in Punditland

progressive.org — Truth and information are all well and good, but to a media conglomerate that wants to stay competitive, good journalism is ancillary to panache. Celebrity talking heads that don’t know what they’re talking about, but act cocksure like they do—now there’s a business model. So, such is punditry as we know it. But change may be afoot, thanks to two forces currently at play. For starters, there’s the Nate Silver paradigm. Much has been made of the affable statistician and that witchdoctory he touts (it’s called math, I think). His rigorous models, based on poll data analysis, are dead-on when it comes to election predictions—a far cry from the gut-calls and cherry-picked rationales typified by Morning Joe and Megyn Kelly. And in a post-Moneyball society, people listen when the statisticians start talking.

more »