{"id":4379,"date":"2011-05-03T12:12:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T19:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=4379"},"modified":"2011-05-03T12:12:00","modified_gmt":"2011-05-03T19:12:00","slug":"confirmed-right-wingers-mostly-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=4379","title":{"rendered":"CONFIRMED: Right-Wingers Mostly Wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"

The pundit class in American media has long been deservedly regarded with disdain. They are, as a group, an arrogant collection know-nothings who, via intense self-delusion, think they know it all. I addressed this sorry situation four years ago when I labeled them The PEP Squad: Perpetually Erroneous Pundits<\/a>. The gist of that essay was to point out that once you become a member of the fraternity it doesn’t matter how much you get wrong, you will still be invited back to deliver more of your bad advice.<\/p>\n

Now there is evidence from an academic study<\/a> of contemporary punditry that shows that the accuracy of most pundits is no better than 50\/50. So if you can flip a coin you’re as smart as the average pundit.<\/p>\n

The most interesting conclusion of the report is the confirmation that liberals are accurate more often than conservatives. That may be the result of the inherent slant of factual information that was first identified by fake pundit Stephen Colbert who noted that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”<\/em><\/p>\n

The top performer in the study is Paul Krugman of the New York Times. The worst performer is uber-pundit George Will.<\/p>\n

The study has some fairly serious methodological flaws in my opinion, including the omission of Fox News from the study. However, the most prominent flaw is that it included currently serving politicians in the roster of pundits. When politicians pontificate on current affairs they are not making predictions – they are campaigning. Therefore, they are not providing their honest opinions about what they believe will happen. They are attempting to influence public opinion to produce the result they hope will happen. To be sure, some bona fide pundits do the same thing, but at least they don’t have the direct conflict of interest that sitting senators have.<\/p>\n

It is fairly safe to assume that the results of the study would not change materially if the politicians were removed. Anyone paying attention to media prognosticators over the years already knows that their success ratio is pathetic. If someone in almost any other job made mistakes as frequently as these losers, they would not have a job for very long. But such are the perks of PEP Squad membership.<\/p>\n

What we need is a Pundit Certification Council. The purpose of this would be to rate pundits on their accuracy and impose mandatory labels. If they fall in the top third percentile they can be regarded as “experts.”<\/em> Those in the middle would retain the “pundit”<\/em> label. And those in the bottom third would have to be designated as “propagandists”<\/em> wherever they appeared in the media.<\/p>\n

This would provide some measure of truth in punditry. It would incentivize opinion givers to strive for accuracy, and give networks, newspapers, etc., a tool to assess the performance of their editorial staff. Then, if they choose to keep propagandists on their payroll, it would be apparent to their viewers and readers. Just imagine tuning in to This Week next Sunday morning and seeing, “George Will, ABC News Propagandist,”<\/em> in large type below his deceitful talking head.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The pundit class in American media has long been deservedly regarded with disdain. They are, as a group, an arrogant collection know-nothings who, via intense self-delusion, think they know it all. I addressed this sorry situation four years ago when I labeled them The PEP Squad: Perpetually Erroneous Pundits. The gist of that essay was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1,684],"tags":[885,709],"class_list":["post-4379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-media-bias","tag-george-will","tag-paul-krugman"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Ijg-18D","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":304,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=304","url_meta":{"origin":4379,"position":0},"title":"Howard Kurtz Defends His Own Kind","author":"Mark NC","date":"12\/18\/2006","format":false,"excerpt":"In his Media Talkback online forum, Howard Kurtz takes questions from readers. Unfortunately, at least in this instance, he doesn't actually answer them: Pennington, N.J.: Why do we keep having people who were wrong on Iraq giving advice on TV? MTP this week had a politician and two Times columnists\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=1"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":804,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=804","url_meta":{"origin":4379,"position":1},"title":"Pundit Population Explosion?","author":"Mark NC","date":"2\/20\/2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Paul Farhi of the Washington Post penned a column today that looks at what he describes as an overpopulation of political pundits on television: \"With the cable news networks ramping up wall-to-wall political coverage, the demand for people to analyze, comment upon and speculate wildly about the presidential race has\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=1"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1653,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=1653","url_meta":{"origin":4379,"position":2},"title":"Throw The Bums Out","author":"Mark NC","date":"5\/23\/2010","format":false,"excerpt":"In the wake of last Tuesday's elections the press has coalesced into a near monotonic dispenser of conventional witless-dom. Pundit after pundit repeated the hackneyed, lazy analysis that the election results reflect a single-minded expression of anti-incumbency on the part of voters. The headlines from newspapers and television shout the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=1"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":747,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=747","url_meta":{"origin":4379,"position":3},"title":"TV Pundit Jeopardy","author":"Mark NC","date":"1\/9\/2008","format":false,"excerpt":"Full disclosure: Of the top three Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton is my third choice. But seriously... Coverage of this campaign has been laughably bad. In New Hampshire, Clinton was predicted to lose to Obama by double digits. Her \"emotional moment\" torpedoed any chance she had of winning. Her staff\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election"","block_context":{"text":"Election","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=152"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8368,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=8368","url_meta":{"origin":4379,"position":4},"title":"Dog Whistling: The Meanstream Media Forecasting Of Election Results","author":"Mark NC","date":"11\/5\/2012","format":false,"excerpt":"There may be just one day to go, but that is no reason for the right-wing media to relax their incessant campaign of unhinged babbling and racial insults. No one should be surprised by Fox News hammering away at their fervent anti-Obama diatribes. This morning they have ramped up their\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election"","block_context":{"text":"Election","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=152"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1117,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=1117","url_meta":{"origin":4379,"position":5},"title":"Pundits Make Electoral College Vote Predictions","author":"Mark NC","date":"11\/2\/2008","format":false,"excerpt":"As the 2008 campaign winds to close, the pundit class is weighing with their electoral vote calls. It's bad news for John McCain when everyone is predicting a Barack Obama win and the Republicans give Obama bigger victory margins than the Democrats. Below are the predicted Electoral College votes for\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election"","block_context":{"text":"Election","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=152"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4379"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4381,"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4379\/revisions\/4381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}