It would certainly work to the benefit of the commonweal if we could bid farewell to
a world in which Peggy Noonan writes easily about how magic dolphins have told her that Romney will win, Joe Klein is held up as an authority on the effect of Sandy on Pennsylvania turnout and thus margin, Karen Tumulty seeks out Bill Galston and Mark Mackinnon as experts on the likelihood of a popular-electoral vote split, David Brooks denies the possibility of forecasting in a world in which anything can happen, Joe Scarborough dumps on the idea of an odds ratio, Ramesh Ponnuru asks "who are you going to trust: the voters as interviewed by the pollsters or the Romney campaign operatives who talk to me?", George Will knows that he knows much less than Michael Barone but doesn't think he can say so and so decides to break with Michael by calling Minnesota for Romney, Michael Barone calls Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for Romney and afterwards claims that his prediction was "reasonable, just as other predictions that either Obama or Romney would win, or would win with more than 300 electoral votes, were reasonable; you could look at the polling dat . . . and come up with pretty different conclusions".
But Being Consistently Wrong About Everything® hasn't inhibited them in the past, it's not inhibiting them now, and it's not likely to inhibit them so long as they retain their sinecures in D.C. think tanks and on Sunday-morning talk show panels, where their ignorant blathering is treated as received wisdom. Sad but true, our nation's dominant politico-media culture rewards the helium-speak of credentialed morons and discounts the findings of data-driven stat geeks: One, because the stat geeks don't pretend to be spiritual adepts who can divine the ways of Washington by reading the entrails of dead animals (or counting the number of Romney yard signs in a Seattle neighborhood, take your pick); and second, because the geeks aren't particularly interested in promoting a particular political agenda---which, in fact, nearly all of the members of our pundit class are deeply dedicated to because they have a great deal to lose if Americans were ever given the kind of leadership class they really want. I think as increasing numbers of people get their news and analysis via the blogosphere than from network/cable TV, the chatterers' influence will gradually wane, but our putrescent media culture didn't reach its current state of ripeness overnight, and its reform and/or possible extinction won't happen quickly either. Would be nice if it did, but as there's still a lot of money riding on preserving the existing Capitol social order, I'm not counting down the days.
---Baron V
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