This close to an election, who do I want to hear from? Nate Silver, of course. I sat down with the FiveThirtyEight founder and math wizard to talk about how he builds his forecasting models, what they’re saying about 2018, how big the Democrats’ structural disadvantage in the House and […] Read more »
Americans are divided over everything except division
This week’s new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll brings some good news: Americans seem to be coalescing around a common idea. It also brings some bad news: The common idea is that we are a remarkably divided nation. And the way we view the forces behind the divides are, well, […] Read more »
What Thomas Jefferson, Donald Trump and the American people think about freedom of the press
Jill Darling, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and Robert Shrum, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences “No government ought to be without censors and where the press is free no one ever will,” wrote Thomas Jefferson to […] Read more »
Finding common ground in rating media
Amid the debate now raging in Washington over whether online news is biased or fake, consider this: What do NationalReview.com, the website of the magazine founded by conservative icon William F. Buckley, and the Nation.com, the Internet arm of the liberal magazine founded by abolitionists in 1865, have in common? […] Read more »
Nate Silver will make one firm prediction about the midterms. Most journalists won’t want to hear it.
After the roller-coaster ride of 2016’s election night, have journalists and political junkies learned not to let conventional wisdom substitute for hard knowledge? Nate Silver — the closest thing there is to a celebrity in the arcane field of statistical journalism — is not wildly optimistic about that. CONT. Margaret […] Read more »
What pollsters get wrong – and right
What are we to make of modern polling? There are a lot of negative takes that one commonly encounters. Many people are skeptical that polls accurately measure public sentiment, pointing to their failure to predict Donald Trump’s victory in 2016. … Anthony Salvanto, the director of elections and surveys at […] Read more »