![]() As election night 2016 wore on, the Times needle, as promised, swung slowly, then rapidly, toward Trump’s name as he marched to victory. None of this is to say the projections or the needle were wrong, even if the underlying polls were. “They call it 538 because that’s the number of times you check it each hour,” the writer Susan Orlean tweeted on the eve of the 2016 election. Trump can’t win, this thinking went, because the polling averages and projections still show Hillary Clinton on the way to victory. Whether intended to or not, those averages became safety blankets for anxious readers to cling to in the run-up to the election. The 2016 election saw the rise of daily polling averages and projection journalism, led largely by the Times and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. It’s human nature to seek out information that helps make sense of the unknowable. ![]() One question political reporters and editors could have weighed in a post-2016 reckoning was whether the growing fixation with prediction and projection serves readers and citizens. But because of that, Rosen adds, “you don’t have any real inquiry into what went wrong.” In this case, the next story was one whose importance couldn’t be understated: the presidency of Donald Trump. ) “It’s like a law of nature that you just move on to the next story,” Jay Rosen, an NYU professor and widely read media critic, recently told me. (Props to HuffPost for doing something like this. No industry-wide listening tour to hear from readers and voters. No 9/11 Commission for political journalism. There was no such reckoning after Trump’s election. You’d think that a moment like that one would have prompted a period of self-reflection, a genuine attempt to understand how we missed the story and how to improve upon the ways we cover the next election. The return of the needle is another sign that, as we kick off a presidential primary with massive stakes for the country, political journalism still hasn’t learned the lessons of 2016.įour years ago, the political class - which includes many journalists - was humbled by the election of Donald Trump. And the moment the outcome is announced, the Times’ needles will be rendered obsolete. No, the piece of information readers want more than anything on election night is who won the election.
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