So now we have a new, and scary, experiment from Nate Silver.
Silver is the mathematician and pollster whose genius at applying numbers to the news produced a great moment in American journalism during the 2012 elections, when he showed news pundits to be completely without credibility. He of course had been doing that for some time in other realms, but to stand on the hill of The New York Times, to make strong assertions about the outcome of an election beforehand against all the shouters, and to be proved right—there never was such a moment, as far as I know.
He started by using his mathematics with baseball. At the Times he extended it into politics, quickly becoming the dominant voice in the analysis of electoral politics.
This is a great force for change in journalism: proving that numbers matter. And that they can trump the pundits. Now, suddenly, Nate is taking us down a steep roller coaster slope that makes our stomachs drop. He’s going to take his serious, numbers journalism to TV. TV? Is this possible?
This great force in journalism that he led at the Times may continue without him at the helm, and I hope there are a hundred Silvers with their own identities and passions who will make it happen.
I hope his television experiment works. But I have one note of caution to suggest from my more than 40 years in journalism. After more than a decade reporting on tobacco and the secret papers that eventually revealed what tobacco companies were doing, I discovered something I never suspected. If you want to know who is serious about news, look up who the lawyers are. In the tobacco wars, TV news largely turned away from the story, because the lawyers at the top were entertainment lawyers. The lawyers at ABC told their reporters, point blank, that they could not handle the tobacco story–and they ordered the reporters to take the damning tobacco documents off of their computers.
At the newspapers, the lawyers were all first-amendment lawyers. They said, if it’s true, we’ll run it, and the New York Times and a variety of other papers published the tobacco papers.
This, I believe is the line between the two journalisms that now exist in America. Nate Silver has just challenged us to believe that the hucksters on the other side can become serious.
Okay, Nate. Let’s see you make them do it.
-Phil Hilts
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