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Nate Silver is a New-Media Superstar

By Matt Zeitlin - Nov 12th, 2008 at 12:29 pm

What’s especially striking about the Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight.com phenomenon is how indicative it is of the Internet Age. Before widespread readership of blogs, or of any Internet content not produced by mainstream media organizations, someone like Silver would have had to peddle his talents as an analyst for a network, newspaper, or magazine.

Ten or so years ago, Silver would, at best, have been writing a weekly column for the Washington Post or New York Times about polling. And that may not have even happened, because much of the media depend on reporting single poll results whose sensational results could just be the result of bias or statistical variance. What Silver did was introduce a degree of skepticism, accuracy, and rigor into polling analysis which had previously been neglected by everyone else who reported on polls. For example, just about every media organization was desperately looking for any evidence that the election was “tightening” in the final weeks, but Silver repeatedly knocked down this notion, because he followed the data instead of the storyline.

Also, Silver has basically delegitimized the first poll aggregator du jour, Real Clear Politics. Until FiveThirtyEight became so popular, political junkies (like me) were looking at RCP everyday for their polling reports. RCP, however, had two problems. Its content (not necessarily its polls) had a definite right-wing bias, and the site’s operators never disclosed what their methodology for aggregation was or why they included or excluded certain polls. Although Silver retracted his accusation that RCP was cherry-picking polls to make things look better for the GOP and McCain, his larger point, that RCP was being too secretive, stood.

If the effect of Silver’s rise is that all news organizations become more responsible about reporting on polls and/or being more open about how they get their data, that would be amazing. But if the man result is just that Silver gets more punditry oppurtunites, that would be nice, too.

Tags: 2008 presidential election, journalism, media, Nate Silver