I agree with this article's conclusion in Silver's case, but I think for different reasons. I think the journalistic epistemology it dismisses is actually a good one, but is not being demonstrated in the attacks on Nate Silver. Long-form, long-lead-time investigative journalism is perhaps where it's best demonstrated, and in that case blends somewhat into the epistemology used by anthropologists, sociologists, and ethnographers: the idea that to understand a situation or culture you need to spend considerable time with it, observing how it works, how the people there think and act, etc., even being yourself embedded in it for a time. But you have to actually do it, which takes considerable work and usually long periods of time, and TV pundits are not. And it's better for some things than others: ethnographers rarely claim that their expertise is in predicting the outcome of elections. If you want to predict something, especially something numerical, an ethnographer would generally say that you're asking the wrong person for that prediction, and should go ask a statistician. That might be one difference with journalists: journalists have less humility about the conclusions they can draw.

I don't think that can always be replaced by just data-crunching, in part because you just move the same problem to the 2nd-order problem of interpretive frames for data, which requires the same in-depth ethnographic field work to get right. The proper balance is a big debate in qualitative vs. quantitative sociology, though.

I do think that when it comes to predicting the outcome of elections, on the other hand, the decision is not hard, because it's almost a best case of a prediction that can be quantified based on available data. So I'd say this is more an issue of punditry vs. careful methodology (of any kind), rather than qualitative vs. quantitative epistemologies. In this specific case, it's mainly just partisanship: some people don't like that Silver's data shows Obama with an ~80% chance of winning, so plug their ears.