[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

Mixolyde wrote:
Robear wrote:

Here is fivethirtyeight's "How good are our predictions?" tool.

Hey Fox, in your own words, how good are you at guarding henhouses?

538 has always owned its "mistakes", constantly reminds people of the limits of their model, tries to improve on it, etc. What more do you want?

So, Mix, which part is the lie? The data in the graphs? Or the interpretation?

Robear wrote:

So, Mix, which part is the lie? The data in the graphs? Or the interpretation?

I don't know, I'm not an expert. Which is why I wouldn't trust anyone to tell me how accurate they are. That's what independent groups and other experts are for.

So, Fortune analyzed 538's performance in the 2020 Presidential rate. It was off by an average of 4.1% from the results, but in spite of that only missed 2 races at the state level and gave Biden the Presidential edge. Does that meet your criteria for always, completely wrong predictions? I mean, they missed 2 out of 51 races. How good do they have to be to hit your mark?

Note that fivethirtyeight takes polling data, weights it against past performance, aggregates it and uses that to develop forecasts. It does not do polling itself. So you're arguing that its models are way off. But it publishes its data and methods as open source, and it does not seem to be taking flak from other professionals.

Given this, what evidence can you find that Nate Silver and team are always, completely wrong in their political predictions? I don't argue that polling isn't imprecise, but characterizing one of the most rigorous and open operations as failing completely would seem to require pretty strong evidence. Where is it?

The record they have seems to show pretty convincingly that that is not true.

dejanzie wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:
Robear wrote:

Here is fivethirtyeight's "How good are our predictions?" tool.

Hey Fox, in your own words, how good are you at guarding henhouses?

538 has always owned its "mistakes", constantly reminds people of the limits of their model, tries to improve on it, etc. What more do you want?

1) An apology from Nate Silver for both 2016 and 2020. So far all I’ve seen from that weasel are variations of “well TECHNICALLY the models were correct.”

2) a fundamental redesign of how they report and display their data such that it isn’t so easily misinterpreted by media outlets

3) at least six years of proof of concept for the changes.

…..what, you asked.

2016 seemed quite decent by 538. Still off by some % obviously, but they did quite a lot better than most of the alternatives. They were simply saying (correctly) that it was a pretty close race, at a time where most others were arguing it was not.

It seems more like a misinterpretation problem. Which I guess you can blame 538 for. But given the state of the internet, and some media, I think I'd primarily point my finger in that direction.

My recollection was that their data itself was good but their presentation of it was really bad. They left themselves wiggle room to be wrong, but were definitely talking like Clinton would have an easy win. Once that started to be in doubt they fell back on how their models did technically show that there was a decent chance she could lose.

Both of those could also be correct. Afaik, the data after the election has indicated Clintons support really started to crumble in the last weeks/days before the election. Especially after the FBI dude decided to interfere.
So showing a pretty high chance of a win a month before, and talking about it as such, might have been correct at that moment.

That said, I would have more faith in their model than their articles in general. One area where they did truly blunder, was in the Republican primary in 2016, where they kept (as most did) dismissing Trumps chances for the longest time. As far as I recall, the line was always "as soon as other candidates withdraw, so it is Trump vs. 1-2 others, his 20% base will be obliterated". Turned out, as we know now, that most of the Republican party was his base.

I think one of 538's biggest mistakes was sort of being the source of if not promoting that Trump couldn't win in 2016 because he would have to get 5-6 key states to win. And while it was possible that he could flip 2-3 of them, he wasn't going to get all of them. Except he did get all of them and they are now the critical states we've been hearing about for 5+ years: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, etc.

I think the mistake they make is projecting anything that gives Democrats hope.

Maybe 538 is always 100% correct, but Democrats just want to prove them wrong, and finds a way to ruin everything, repeatedly.

538: No way Democrats can lose an election ever again with shifting demographics, and Republicans being against *check notes*; saving the planet and human lives, facts, freedom, democracy, women, born children, non-billionaires, non-conservatives, and conservatives.
DNC be like: Hold my beer.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

I think the mistake they make is projecting anything that gives Democrats hope.

And assuming Republicans won't cheat and foreign governments won't interfere.

Shadout wrote:

Maybe 538 is always 100% correct, but Democrats just want to prove them wrong, and finds a way to ruin everything, repeatedly.

538: No way Democrats can lose an election ever again with shifting demographics, and Republicans being against *check notes*; saving the planet and human lives, facts, freedom, democracy, women, born children, non-billionaires, non-conservatives, and conservatives.
DNC be like: Hold my beer.

538 literally said the opposite.

In Politics, Demographics Are Not Destiny

538 are not magical oracles, but their predictions have consistently been above average. I'm not sure why so many are keen to sh*t all over 538.

I was just joking about Democrats. And yeah, their models have been quite good compared to others.

Stengah wrote:

My recollection was that their data itself was good but their presentation of it was really bad.

Yep. They use the same tactics as snake oil sales. "the data suggests a landslide Biden victory in 2020,

....but, umm,

we're not suggesting that. ;)”

Every news source from Breitbart to jacobin: "SIR NATE SILVER OF THE DATAS PREDICTS LANDSLIDE BIDEN VICTORY"

Vrikk wrote:

Chris Cuomo just suspended by CNN indefinitely.

(Good.)

Fired.

Rat Boy wrote:
Vrikk wrote:

Chris Cuomo just suspended by CNN indefinitely.

(Good.)

Fired.

Even better! Dude was bad. We should strive to have better journalists.

Tribalism should not be a thing. I'm looking at you, Twitterverse.

At this point it would be nice to have journalists. We need TV and movies that make journalism cool again, please.

Probably have to look outside of corporate-owned newsrooms for any of those.

Mixolyde wrote:

At this point it would be nice to have journalists. We need TV and movies that make journalism cool again, please.

We've been watching The Morning Show on Apple+. Lots of big stars, led by Jennifer Aniston and Reece Witherspoon. Halfway through season 1, and it's doing a pretty good job of skewering broadcast network journalism for the farce it is.

Fingers crossed that this splits the ticket and provides Abrams what she needs to win.

(CNN)Former US Sen. David Perdue officially announced his run for governor of Georgia on Monday, launching a primary challenge to sitting Republican Gov. Brian Kemp in a state that has been trending away from the GOP for years.

Mixolyde wrote:

At this point it would be nice to have journalists. We need TV and movies that make journalism cool again, please.

Speaking of which...

What Happens to Democracy When Local Journalism Dries Up?

Washington Post wrote:

"It has been our great privilege to bring you news from Stoneham and Woburn over the years,” read the announcement. “We regret to inform you that this will be the final edition of the Sun-Advocate newspaper.” The Massachusetts weekly, as of August, is no more.

It is an increasingly familiar story across the United States. Already in a sharp downward spiral, the local news industry was hit hard by the covid-19 pandemic. The worst blows were taken by newspapers — businesses that, as a group, had never recovered from the digital revolution and the 2008 recession. Between 2005 and the start of the pandemic, about 2,100 newspapers closed their doors. Since covid struck, at least 80 more papers have gone out of business, as have an undetermined number of other local publications, like the California Sunday Magazine, which folded last fall — and then won a Pulitzer Prize eight months later.

Those papers that survived are still facing difficult straits. Many have laid off scores of reporters and editors — according to Pew Research Center, the newspaper industry lost an astonishing 57 percent of its employees between 2008 and 2020 — making these publications a mere specter of their former selves. They are now “ghost newspapers”: outlets that may bear the proud old name of yore but no longer do the job of thoroughly covering their communities and providing original reporting on matters of public interest.

Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University journalism professor, describes the loss of the Sun-Advocate in Massachusetts as “a grim picture but not nearly as catastrophic as in some parts of the country.” After all, he told me, there are other news organizations nearby, including the Daily Times Chronicle in Woburn and WickedLocal.com, a digital site run by Gannett that serves swaths of Massachusetts. (Gannett had owned the Sun-Advocate until its closure.)

By contrast, in many regions of the country, there is no local news coverage at all, or next to none. These areas have come to be known as “news deserts” — a term used by academics and researchers to refer to areas where coverage of the community by local news outlets is minimal or nonexistent. It’s in such places that the collapse of local news is being felt most dramatically. Then again, even if you don’t live in a defined news desert, you may have noticed that your regional paper long ago ditched actively covering your community if it is outside the immediate city and first-ring suburbs.

Between January 2005 and December 2020, about a quarter of U.S. local print newspapers ceased publishing, according to data that Northwestern professor Penny Muse Abernathy collected while at the University of North Carolina. By 2020, out of the 3,000-plus U.S. counties, half had just one local print newspaper of any kind. Only a third had a daily newspaper. Over 200 counties had no newspaper whatsoever.

This trend in local news has been life-changing, of course, for the employees who lose their jobs and incomes. But even more concerning is what happens to the communities they used to serve — and, more broadly, what happens to our society and our ability to self-govern when local news dries up.

An extreme case of the withering of local news over the past decade is Youngstown, Ohio, where the beloved 150-year-old daily newspaper, the Vindicator, abruptly went out of business in 2019. The death of “the Vindy” made Youngstown — just minutes from the former General Motors manufacturing plant in Lordstown — the biggest U.S. city without its own daily newspaper. (A neighboring city’s newspaper began putting out a Vindicator edition, plus a small group of former staffers launched a digital news site, Mahoning Matters. But it is not the same as a dedicated newsroom of 40 journalists.)

As I researched my 2020 book, “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy,” I traveled to Youngstown just after the shocking announcement. Residents had gathered at a quickly called public meeting, and many were in tears as they contemplated the future of their city and region without this institution.

I spent some time with Bertram de Souza, the paper’s editorial page editor, who had been at the Vindicator for 40 years. As a reporter, he helped reveal the corruption of James Traficant, who was expelled from Congress and sent to prison in 2002 after being convicted of racketeering, taking bribes and using his staff to do chores at his home and on his houseboat. Youngstown “is absolutely the kind of place that needs watchdog reporting,” de Souza told me, “and this newspaper was committed to exposing corruption.” The problem, going forward, is that when it comes to revealing malfeasance, you don’t know what you don’t know: If there’s no one to keep public officials honest, citizens might never find out how their faith is being broken and their tax dollars squandered.

Mark Brown, the paper’s general manager and a member of the family that owned it, said something I found poignant as he recalled the Vindy’s heyday, when editors were able to send a reporter or freelancer to all of the municipal board and school board meetings in a three-county area. Public officials knew journalists were present, Brown said, “and they behaved.”

What happened to the Vindicator was a particularly notable version of an oft-repeated story: There just wasn’t enough money anymore to keep the paper afloat and pay the staff. Brown told me that the Vindy had lost money for 20 of the 22 years before its closing because of shrinking circulation, limited advertising revenue and rising costs.

While it was still in business, the Vindicator was relatively lucky because it was owned by a local family for 132 years. Many other newspapers have fallen out of local hands and under the control of large chains, some owned by private equity firms or hedge funds. One of these, Alden Global Capital (sometimes known as Digital First Media), perhaps the worst of the so-called vulture capitalists, earlier this year snapped up the storied Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun and others in the well-regarded Tribune chain.

From a journalism perspective, this was widely — and rightly — regarded as a disaster. “Devastating” is how Ann Marie Lipinski, the Tribune’s former top editor, now curator of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism, characterized the development to me in an interview. And tech journalist Karl Bode commented darkly on Twitter: “we’re slowly replacing a functional press with PR spam, hedge fund dudebros, trolling substack opinion columnists, foreign and domestic disinformation, brand-slathered teen influencers, and hugely consolidated dumpster fires like Sinclair Broadcasting.” (Sinclair Broadcast Group, the second-largest owner of local television stations in the country, has at times required its news anchors to read scripts with a strong conservative bent on the air.)

It’s not just watchdog journalism that suffers when news organizations shrink or die. The decline affects civic engagement and political polarization, too. Studies show that people who live in areas with poor local news coverage are less likely to vote, and when they do, they are more likely to do so strictly along party lines. To put it bluntly, the demise of local news poses the kind of danger to our democracy that should have alarm sirens screeching across the land.

Then there’s the matter of public trust. In general, people trust the mainstream news media — or as I prefer to call it, the reality-based press — far less now than they did several decades ago. Around the time of The Washington Post’s landmark reporting of the Watergate scandal, and the publication of the Pentagon Papers (the secret history of the Vietnam War) by the New York Times and The Post, the vast majority of citizens basically believed what they heard and read in the traditional media. CBS’s Walter Cronkite was known as “the most trusted man in America.”

Most studies show that there is one exception to this steady decline in trust: Americans find their local news sources significantly more credible than national news sources. Yet these are the very same outlets that are rapidly disappearing. That’s especially worrisome at a time when conspiracy theories and misinformation are rampant.

Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor and author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century,” has called the loss of local news “the essential problem of our republic.” It is nothing less than a crisis, he says, and a deepening one. “The only way we can talk to other people is with some common understanding of the facts, for example whether or not our water is polluted or whether or not the teachers in our school are on strike,” Snyder told E-International Relations. We don’t have to like what we learn about our communities through local news reporting, he noted, but it benefits us nonetheless. “When local news goes away, then our sense of what is true shifts from what is helpful to us in our daily lives to what makes us ‘feel good,’ which is something entirely different,” Snyder said. And, I would add, something very troubling.

This crisis, to be sure, is not just about newspapers, and certainly not just about newspapers in their printed incarnations. What’s important is the journalism, not the precise form it comes in. Local newspapers have been the center of most regions’ media ecosystems for many years because historically they have employed the most journalists and as a result produced the majority of original news. But they aren’t the only way to provide local news, by any means. Public radio, local television and digital-only news sites — often newly formed nonprofits — are increasingly part of the equation. And if there is a future, it surely is a mostly digital one.

But digital news sites, too, have struggled, and many have closed during the pandemic, including the well-regarded Bklyner, whose Brooklyn-based editor and publisher Liena Zagare wrote a heart-rending note in late August announcing a September end to publication. “Since I never figured out how to get paid regularly for the many hats I still wear … I cannot hire someone to fill in while I take the time off that I need to make sure that I, too, can be sustainable,” she explained. Among her roles: assigning stories, fact-checking, editing, reporting, writing, copy-editing, publishing, social media, tech, subscriptions, ad sales and handling payroll.

All of this leaves many localities — from rural areas to New York City’s most populous borough — struggling for answers.

Want to bet he shows up on Fox or OAN as a talking head?

(CNN)Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of California announced Monday he'll leave the House in the coming weeks, in order to follow an undisclosed "new opportunity to fight for the most important issues I believe in."
"I'm writing to let you know I've decided to pursue this opportunity, and therefore I will be leaving the House of Representatives at the end of 2021," Nunes said in a letter to his constituents.

JC wrote:

Want to bet he shows up on Fox or OAN as a talking head?

(CNN)Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of California announced Monday he'll leave the House in the coming weeks, in order to follow an undisclosed "new opportunity to fight for the most important issues I believe in."
"I'm writing to let you know I've decided to pursue this opportunity, and therefore I will be leaving the House of Representatives at the end of 2021," Nunes said in a letter to his constituents.

Amazing the dude never made it to jail after his underhand stuff. (I mean of course not too amazing Rs get away with it mostly)

Hmm. Dead girl or live boy?

There is still time...

OG_slinger wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

At this point it would be nice to have journalists. We need TV and movies that make journalism cool again, please.

Speaking of which...

What Happens to Democracy When Local Journalism Dries Up?

A major problem that wasn't mentioned is that after the newspapers shut down, those looking to stay informed about their community often end up joining local Facebook groups, and we all know how that goes.

Stengah wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:
Mixolyde wrote:

At this point it would be nice to have journalists. We need TV and movies that make journalism cool again, please.

Speaking of which...

What Happens to Democracy When Local Journalism Dries Up?

A major problem that wasn't mentioned is that after the newspapers shut down, those looking to stay informed about their community often end up joining local Facebook groups, and we all know how that goes.

Even worse there's been a proliferation of online-only local "newspapers."

All the rotten does seem to attract each other...

Rep. Elise Stefanik, the House GOP conference chair and third ranking House Republican, congratulated Nunes, tweeting, "Devin had a spine of steel and an unyielding commitment to fighting for the truth and the Constitution as Chairman and Republican Leader of the House Intelligence Committee. America is forever grateful."

As a small part of America. I am not grateful.

Another reason for his exit

Nunes’ decision comes at a time when his political future appeared in possible jeopardy — draft maps released in the once-a-decade realignment of congressional districts suggested he would face a challenging reelection in the 2022 midterms. Those maps will not be finalized until later this month.