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Comment by fourmii | Hacker News Reader

It's another symptom of poisoned politics here in the US. As far as I've seen, the people who are attacking Nate Silver are Republicans who simply don't like what Silver's stats are pointing to. They're the same people who claimed last month's unemployment figures were somehow manipulated because it showed a downward trend in unemployment.

It's also an insight into the state of journalism and the press in this country. It's pretty hard to find objective reporting these days, sources of 'news' seems to be full of highly opinionated punditry rather than unbiased reporting.

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If Silver were predicting the race going the other way, Democrats would attack him. People tend to attack things that don't fit their desired outcomes. Leftists attack Fox for bias but they have no problem with the bias of MSNBC. It isn't bias people care about, it's bias against their own views. There are very few objective people.

Did Democrats attack 538 when Silver predicted huge losses in the Congressional races in 2010? I don't recall this.

It's not for nothing that one party is considered the anti-science party.

No one pays attention to off-year races.

Actually, Democrats attacked one another and/or Obama when the race tightened in early October. You wouldn't believe the wailing and gnashing of teeth. But seldom would you hear somebody say, well, the polls must be wrong.

The difference is that generally when the polls sour for Dems, they blame themselves collectively. When Repubs see the polls sour, they blame the polls. Neither is objective, but one of them is somewhat less isolated from reality.

Do you have anything to support your implication that MSNBC is as "ideologically biased" (my words, not yours) as Fox News, and thus as worthy of attack for their bias? Consider that, as one example, FNC's VP of News has handed down memos instructing producers to adopt a conservative stance in their stories [1].

[1]: http://mediamatters.org/research/2004/07/14/33-internal-fox-...

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