I don't see anything in the article that makes me feel like they are interested in fixing that problem.
- (some) polls were systematically off, mostly because they underestimated white non-college turnout and overestimated black turnout. Note that poll errors were actually lower than for any other election–only this time they actually got the winner wrong.
- Most of the poll aggregators operated under the assumption of statistical independence of state-level results. This was a serious mistake, and both Huffpost as well as The Upshot (to a lesser extend) should be somewhat ashamed. 538, by the way, did this right and had Trump at 3X% on election day.
- There actually was some significant change in voters' intent in the last days, possibly fuelled by all the news stories the FBI directors was generating. It's highly likely that an election two weeks earlier or two weeks later would have ended differently.
It's also important to note that newspapers aren't really in the business of predicting the future. If they "relied too much on social media" for any facts they reported, I'd love to see some examples.
That is, we're not just talking about getting the numbers wrong. The "narrative" itself is way out of whack as well.
The problem was so many people just hated Clinton, and at the time, Trump had more people positive about him.
I look at net Promotor Score on any type of entity. It's predicted the rise of Bicoin, and various other currencies, but it's not always perfect. For example, it didn't predict a brexit.
It could just be I don't have enough data. It's a work in progress.
> it’s now clear that Mrs. Clinton was weaker heading into Oct. 28 than was understood at the time. Several other polls were conducted over the same period that showed Mr. Trump gaining quickly on Mrs. Clinton in the days ahead of the Comey letter. And the timing of these polls — particularly the gap between when they were taken and when they were released — has probably helped to exaggerate the effect of Mr. Comey’s letter on the presidential race
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/upshot/a-2016-review-ther...
I will say that when I eventually sent an email to the NYT's corrections email address, they immediately fixed the errors in the articles. This won't help with close judgment calls or understanding how the newsroom works, but at least it can be used to address blatant errors.
Yes they did. They know it. And they don't really give a fuck.
After the election they did some public navel gazing about what went wrong. To prove they were serious, there was even an editorial about The Future of the Times.
So I wrote to Ms Spayd. I challenged her, at the next meeting of journalists and editors, to say something like: "show of hands, who voted for Donald Trump for president".
My contention is that the result would be zero. Nada. Zilch. Even if they did vote for Trump, they wouldn't be dumb enough to admit it publicly to a room full of their colleagues.
So how can the Times ever begin to understand the 46% of the country who are the deplorables who voted for Trump?
They can't, and they don't want to.
Or, maybe, Ms. Spayd actually did what I suggested. And the powers that be decided that she just wasn't a good fit for them anymore. And that's why she was shown the door. :)
You don't need to be a member of a certain group to be able to report on them. E.g. you don't need to be terminally ill to report on people that are terminally ill, or member of the KKK to report on them.
If there are ZERO Trump voters among staff at the Times, that is a strong indicator that the Times reporters are spending a lot of time in a bubble, and could benefit by hiring a conservative just to function as devil's advocate (like Fox News did with Alan Colmes).
They do hire conservatives (Brooks, Douthat, Kristol, etc) and they just hired Bret Stephens.
> (like Fox News did with Alan Colmes)
You make it sound as if Alan Colmes, during his time at Fox, was there to give an equal voice to the liberal side of an issue, but in reality he was just marginalized to be the token "lefty" punching bag for Hannity.
But even Brooks knew enough to publicly declare that he wouldn't vote for Trump, even though Trump's political views probably aligned more closely to Brooks than Hillary's views did.
Then I'm not sure why you have such a strong opinion of the NY Times? Also, no one at the paper is using Brooks as a token conservative in the same manner as what Colmes was for Hannity. Brooks even appears weekly on PBS.
> But even Brooks knew enough to publicly declare that he wouldn't vote for Trump, even though Trump's political views probably aligned more closely to Brooks than Hillary's views did.
Political views aren't binary. Brooks can have differing views from Trump and Clinton. I don't understand the underlying need to declare blind allegiance to Trump just because one is a conservative.
Not that Trump is a true conservative, but ...
Our current political system more or less forces binary choices.
E.g. take the case of the Supreme Court. Unequivocally Gorsuch is a much more conservative appointee than Garland would have been.
Were Trump's negatives so high (in Brooks' eyes) that Brooks was willing to accept perhaps two or three liberal court appointees from Hillary rather than live with Trump's baggage? Apparently so!
But even putting someone like Douthat on the editorial side doesn't impact the news side of the Times.
I think the NYTimes does a pretty decent job, but there is no question they missed the story of 2016 because their news reporters are all inside the bubble.
Agree that Colmes was an unglorified punching bag. Fox is the wrong entity to imitate.
From where I sit, the Republican party (often called "conservative") is divided into several factions right now. The think-tank side traditionally caters to three of them: neo-conservative / "law and order" type causes, libertarian causes, or business interests. The Republican party also is the home of both a religious / fundamentalist wing, and a cultural-identity / white nationalist wing; these sides are generally not well represented in the think tanks.
Maybe the later two are what you consider "mainstream"? The issue with the later two camps is that the representative media can be very populist in nature. And populism can be very us-vs-them / emotion driven, sometimes with disregard for facts. This probably would not fit well at all with the current editorial stance of the Times, even if the populism comes from the left.
That's because reporters don't generally despise the terminally ill.
But if you want to honestly report about politics, then you can't think of people as deplorables. You can't automatically ascribe all sorts of negatives to 46% of the country because they didn't vote for "your" candidate.
If you despise what you're reporting on you will never, can never, report honestly. Your biases will overwhelm your coverage. You will not be able to understand what you're writing about.
And in the case of the Times, they don't even make an attempt at impartiality. They don't need to. Their target audience exists in the same bubble.
(And let's not even get into how loaded of a comparison you just made...)