Nate Silver Finds Unusual Patterns in a Polling Firm's Data. Was it fabricated?
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
Instead, we already see clues about what will happen: the pollster is threatening a lawsuit, which will be a sure loser but nonetheless drain resources and time from its target (either Nate himself or fivethirtyeight). The polls from the offending pollster will, I'm completely certain, be reported with utter credulity in the 2010 election cycle and beyond. The fact that the books are cooked will not even be mentioned in media reports, and will ultimately matter not at all.
This is because we simply do not have a well-functioning media environment.
Ultimately, in this case it would seem the damage will be pretty brutal unless Nate Silver was wrong. Either they don't sue and don't disclose and the result is no one trusts them enough to pay for their polling (after all, what's the point in paying for a poll if it's going to come under question afterwards?) or they'll sue while not releasing the support for their polls/data on their merits - and that also opens them up to discovery which could be even more damaging.
The best case scenario at this point is if they can publicly prove Nate Silver is wrong. And based on their policies in the past of not releasing the additional supporting data, I suspect this won't happen.
We already know how the civility argument works. The tea-party folks are bringing violence to US politics and the G20 thugs are crumpets and milk.
> While the videos themselves seem legit, I'd rather not leave exposes of political groups up to their political enemies.
Bully for you, but they're pretty much the only folks willing to do the work.
If you don't like the way news is made, make your own.
Do you have a constructive point to make? You've taken everything I said completely out of context and made completely irrelevant responses. As it happens, the last sentence is the central point of my comment, and serves to motivate and justify the preceding two sentences. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear enough.
Maybe it would be useful to me to remember that a lot of people read English as if they were finite automata--once they read a given sentence they get their heads into a given state, even if the sentence immediately following it provides essential context to what I actually meant.
I didn't say that you did. However, you do live in a world with those nasty social problems....
> Do you have a constructive point to make?
My point is that either you just bitch or you set up unreasonable constraints. The difference between the two or your reasons for them may be important to you, but the end result is pretty much the same.
> You've taken everything I said completely out of context and made completely irrelevant responses. As it happens, the last sentence is the central point of my comment, and serves to motivate and justify the preceding two sentences.
Oh really? Let's review that last sentence "Political enemies only want to discredit their opponents--they're not interested in truth, and for every Acorn video there's a Swift Boat smear campaign with no basis in fact."
That sentence says that you find it likely that the Acorn tapers managed to capture some "fact" and may have been interested in truth. Yet, that's not good enough for you. Since the folks with appropriate motives aren't doing the work, dismissing folks with "bad motives" means that you're going to do without.
Someone else already pointed out that your "no basis in fact" statement is false so it's unclear why you'd bring up that sentence.
On the other side of it, I'm not sure your concerns that false partisan attacks will win the day are justified - look at the "birthers" who have been thoroughly discredited and marginalized (ie the ones who claim Obama wasn't born on American soil).
At least with respect to Acorn, it has had a slew of scandals plague them and yet various levels of the US government had continued to trust them with rather important tasks - e.g. help at the IRS, census, etc.. In my view these were far worse offenses than the 'entrapment' that brought them down. There is no reason that larger media outlets shouldn't have pursued this story themselves - after all - the cost even of putting out the Acorn story was less than five thousand dollars. Meanwhile, supposedly reputable outlets like the NYT had trouble covering the story until the Obama Administration and Congress began to react and cut funding and ties to Acorn.
I'm all for disclosure. Let's be open to criticism/investigations from anyone and everyone and let them be judged on their merits.
Also, the Acorn worker in question reported the two actors in the video to police: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,553423,00.html
I think this only reinforces the original point that we need more investigations like this and people who are willing to challenge various organizations and governments - and further - that traditional media outlets are often either unable (given the breadth of targets/perceived costs) or unwilling (possibly because of ideology?) to do it.
[On Glenn Reynolds, you'll find that he has been less than supportive of Republicans pointing out that the 'tea parties' are less about being pro-Republican as they are about being more a reaction to greater government interventions - which were started under the previous Republican administration]
I totally agree that we need more investigations like this, and that this investigation certainly seems to have uncovered some interesting stuff, but I also get the feeling like there are some pieces from the story that are missing, and I wonder a little if that isn't maybe a general problem when these kinds of sting operations are carried out by activists with a strong political agenda.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/opinion/27pubed.html?_r=2&...
"But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself."
I, too, hope that there will be more disclosure on the story as they are fairly serious allegations and it would be helpful to know the sample sizes of the report - but what I find surprising is how non-curious those like the NYT were - and they're admitting as much.
They seem to have entirely ignored the story or attacked those doing the reporting as opposed to digging up facts for themselves. This reinforces the point not only that we need more investigations like this but that we can't rely on traditional media outlets for these stories. As the NYT notes, sure, sometimes these stories just turn out to be unsubstantiated polemics - but that doesn't necessarily make them wrong.
Bullshit. The tea parties are about misplaced righteous anger. Most of the people there have no idea what "government intervention" means and are simply reactionaries to Fox News/right smear propaganda. It's clear that most of them don't even know what they're protesting about, they just want to call the President a socialist.
The much broader problem that affects all of the above has been that readerships have been in decline - in some cases rather steep decline. Further, from the supply side of the argument, the supply of media that's available to advertisers has broadened considerably because of the internet. But there's always been demand for valuable content - and that's what I would suggest has been a problem. That for quite some time that demand was captive - people didn't have alternatives.
Now they do, and now they're looking elsewhere. Even when the businesses in the retail, auto, financial and real estate sectors come back, traditional media won't - it's been in decline far longer than this current/past recession. This I think has a great deal to do with the value (or lack thereof) that people see in traditional media versus the alternative sources they can find increasingly available because of the net.
I don't know if investigative journalism has declined independently. What I do think however is that there is far more investigative journalism happening outside of traditional media outlets which has made traditional media outlets considerably less important. For this reason, and the pervasive view that the media is biased (as many journalists themselves even admit on the Pew poll), I think they've seen readerships decline - and rightfully so.
He may be right, but I'm going to need a little more convincing if someone wants to assume that polling data would exhibit Benford's law.