"How Did a Demagogue Win A Major Party Nomination?"

That is the excellent and important question that Nate Silver began with on his fascinating and quite frightening podcast for the NPR program On The Media.   The podcast is a response to a column by his former New York Times colleague, Jim Rutenberg, slamming "data journalism" and assigning it a good part of the blame for why conventional journalists didn't call the race right.

Silver, after posing that question pointed out that Donald Trump had the all time-worst record for lying and who simply ignored the matter of whether what he was saying was true.  That's true even when he tells one transparent whopper of a lie  after another and the political climate - for Republicans, at least - doesn't punish him at all for lying his head off in the most purely Mussolini-style candidacy that has ever gone this far in the modern history of the United States.

The first two minutes of the discussion had some of the most incisive points that I've heard a journalist raise about his own profession's conduct in a long time.  I don't buy the predictions of "data journalism" and I never did once I was old enough to understand how opinion polling is conducted.  Listen to the discussion of "small sample size" and the declaration of Harry Enten (?) that empiricism can take you only so far. This shouldn't be believed for a second to endorse polling.   It's the insights into journalistic practice in the podcast that make it interesting.

Shortly after that Nate Silver talks about "chickens coming home to roost" which, of course, brings to mind that two short years ago the New York Times was boasting about how it, fifty years earlier, had made lying protected speech in the Sullivan Decision.  That is a point I won't ever stop repeating.  That we have Donald Trump lying his way into the White House and the media wasn't shouting his demagogic lying down for the past year and it is now complaining that it was caught off guard is The Great Grey Lady protesting a hell of a lot more than a bit too much.

The media, the news media, the alleged news media, the entertainment and infotanement media, those are what produced Donald Trump just as they produced Ronald Reagan.  Both of them were media figures who were either coaxed into politics or entered it as a publicity stunt.  That Ronald Reagan was installed and promoted by the media which so ignobly went down On Bended Knee* to him was the trial run for the Trump catastrophe.  Rutenberg clearly wants to place the blame for the failure of his style of political reporting on the upstarts.  This excuse for why political reporters didn't do their jobs is especially disgusting:

To be fair, given Mr. Trump’s reality television background, there was some cause to suspect that his presidential announcement last summer signaled that his campaign would be part “performance art” and that there was the possibility of a free fall, as McKay Coppins of BuzzFeed wrote.

It was another thing to declare, as The Huffington Post did, that coverage of his campaign could be relegated to the entertainment section (and to add a disclaimer to articles about him) and still another to give Mr. Trump a “2 percent” chance at the nomination despite strong polls in his favor, as FiveThirtyEight did six months before the first votes were cast. Predictions that far out can be viewed as being all in good fun. But in Mr. Trump’s case, they also arguably sapped the journalistic will to scour his record as aggressively as those of his supposedly more serious rivals. In other words, predictions can have consequences.

It is especially interesting in light of what Nate Silver said later in the podcast about his relations with Rutenberg and the other political reporters when he worked with them at The New York Times and how enraged they were when the data-journalists mixed traditional reporting techniques in with their numbers crunching (beginning at about 7:20 on the recording).   The turf battle included the political reporters being angry when Silver's organization published a piece saying that Rick Santorum had probably won the Iowa caucus in 2012.   The reason given for the anger was that "their Romney sources and their Iowa GOP were upset".

That makes this part of what Rutenberg said especially interesting.

Of course, the data journalism at FiveThirtyEight, The Upshot at The Times and others like them can guide readers by putting races in perspective and establishing valuable new ways to assess politics. But the lesson in Virginia, as the Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi wrote at the time, was that nothing exceeds the value of shoe-leather reporting, given that politics is an essentially human endeavor and therefore can defy prediction and reason.

I don't disagree with the point about the unpredictablity of elections, that they "defy prediction and reason," which is the exact reason that I am skeptical about opinion polling as a reliably scientific project.  But if the political reporters' idea of "shoe-leather reporting" is cultivating their access to Romney's people, the Iowa GOP, and other interested parties then it has sources that are far more likely to actively spin the ersatz information that the reporters get from them.   If that's the NYT idea of "shoe-leather reporting" it's a safe bet that what we get on TV is likely as bad.  When they worry about their sources being upset with what gets reported, that the news didn't spin right to maintain their access to insiders that they are supposedly reporting about, things are seriously wrong in the news business.

If this is accurate, we might see why it is that political reporting has gone totally to hell and it is exactly the same reason that Mark Hertsgaard said the political reporters and the media in general entirely misreported the Reagan administration, which still holds the record as the most blatantly corrupt administration in our history as measured in indicted and convicted officials.  Hertsgaard's book was published in 1988,   The profession of journalism has had 28 years to do something about that and it has done absolutely nothing because, if anything, they are worse now than they were then and the result is Donald Trump being the nominee of the Republican party with even those he has insulted and slammed, such as former prisoner-of-war, John McCain, going down on bended knee to him.

Journalists have gotten so stinking lazy and their profession has degenerated back into the standards of turn-of-the-last-century yellow journalism now that they have been freed from truth and the facts that truth is made from.  I will grant the data-journalists that, they are trying to find ways to find an un-spun truth, though I think they are putting way too much faith in the methods of social-science.  I don't question their relative idealism as compared to the cynicism of so many journalists, I question their faith in how those numbers are gathered and what they really mean.   I will say that until this morning, I didn't realize that intent was probably why I felt their analysis of post-facto numbers is, actually, more reliable than that of the traditional news organizations.

If we don't dodge the bullet this time, if Donald Trump becomes president and he does rule as a fascist demagogue, it will be the responsibility of the American media, the free press which was freed from having to worry about lying in 1964 at the behest of the New York Times and the legal and media organizations that supported it in New York Times v. Sullivan.  Free to lie, free to misrepresent, free to publish "opinion journalism" which is given virtual carte blanche to tell the right kinds of lies**  is proclaiming itself reluctant to go after and publish the truth.   If anyone is holding their breath that the media, either the posh print media or the really effective media, TV, radio, internet, is going to suddenly switch into a mode where they do that and prevent an outright demagogue from winning this election, I predict they could die waiting for that to happen.


*  From Library Journal

During the Reagan years, the White House Press Corps has “functioned less as an independent than as a palace court press,” according to Hertsgaard. [The author of the book, On Bended Knee.] Basing his arguments on hundreds of interviews with important administration leaders and reporters, Hertsgaard convincingly portrays the White House press as noncritical and sycophantic. As members of the same power elite that they write about, White House reporters more often than not agree with the President’s policies. In addition, they have been reluctant to strongly criticize Reagan for fear of being cut off from the flow of information and of losing their privileged status.

**  But woe to any of them who tell the wrong kinds of lies, lies that will not please the corporate class and their political arm, the Republican-fascists or who get caught in even insubstantial fibs while being black or, especially black women.   I will never overlook that Patti Smith was fired by the same Boston Globe that kept on Mike Barnicle as he did entirely worse.  Nothing has changed in that regard in big media.

Update:   Donald Trump had the all time-worst record for lying and he simply ignored the matter of whether what he was saying was true.  It occurs to me that, coming from entertainment media, Donald Trump has essentially the same attitude towards factual accuracy allowed for "opinion journalists" the kind of journalists who make up the bulk of those who get on cabloids and talk shows the most.  The distinction that cuts slack for lying, misrepresenting the truth, spinning, etc. for "opinion journalists" sets up a distinction that doesn't really exist in peoples' minds.   People rely on what they get from allegedly authoritative sources, such as the NYT or NPR or whatever source they want to trust, their minds don't make the distinction that allows for the fact that the profession of journalism has given lots of its members a free-pass on passing on phony or plainly untrue information.   People can be informed by lies as easily as they can the truth and are even more likely to buy the lies as they can be constructed to be easily assimilated and gratifying to the one who believes them.  The truth starts with the disadvantage that it often can't be sold with the methods of a con man.   That anyone working in journalism in 2016 has to ask how did a TV trained fascist demagogue win the Republican nomination, they provided him with everything he needed to do it, including an audience trained to buy lies.