I don’t mean to defend CNN or the MSM — or even the New York Times. Rather, I mean to suggest that there are many more journalists and experts who can help us than are found on CNN or the New York Times. The failures one outlet do not condemn all media in all things. Yes, television is ratings driven. But there are serious magazines out there, serious blog by experts out there, and even NPR/PRI (easier to consume, not often as meaty and deep as serious magazines and experts’ blogs).

I agree with you that we need to teach students to recognize point of view, bias and all that — I think I already wrote that somewhere on this thread. Of course, we should teach them to look beyond CNN, and not to give up on experts and journalists simply because CNN has fallen short.

All information is biased. The hard job is to recognize the bias and take it into account when you use the source. That is what we need to teach our students (and ourselves).

The main stream media can play a valuable role, but most news organizations are being forced to report at the level of the lowest common denominator. Paris Hilton is more important than the Iran election because more people want to hear about Paris. The tougher the economic climate becomes, the more that economics forces the MSM pitch to those who aren’t interested in the world in which they live – - – except for the lives of the rich and famous. This causes the people who do care to take their attention elsewhere. A vicious and destructive cycle for a Democracy.

I think that you are proposing a false dichotomy, and defining one of the two possibilities rather narrowly.

CNN is enormously flawed. CNN and NYTimes might be the respective pinnacles of the broadcast and print mainstream media, but that really says more about their ubiquity than than their sagacity. Though the New York TImes is superior to CNN, it is far from perfect, itself. There is a wealth of other publications out there, and other broadcast outlets as well. CNN’s failures do not mean that the entire MSM has failed. (In fact, I would argue that CNN’s failures are far more of a condemnation of cable news than of any larger industry.)

More important, however, is that false dichotomy. There are more options than watching CNN vs. diving into the raw data . For example, of wealth of in-depth and intelligent discussions of news and issues on various NPR programs. There are news magazines, from general interest (e.g. Newsweek, US News, The Economist) to specialty (e.g. Foreign Policy). Of course, there are experts out there who blog (e.g. Andrew Gelman, Juan Cole).

You are right that journalists often work around a common narrative, and that sometimes that narrative is a flawed one. It’s good to keep in mind who is more prone to do that, and who is less. Our response to that problem should not be to dismiss them all and try to do their jobs for them. Rather, is should be to pick among them more thoughtfully, and consume them carefully.

Academics do the same thing. For many years all chemists “knew” that the Noble Gases didn’t form compounds, so they didn’t even try to make them. That was wrong! I think you can provide examples from every discipline, whatever it may be. It is very hard to break out of the conventional mindset of your colleagues, but that makes it hard to accept change. When everyone has access to the raw data, it becomes more likely that someone will shout, “The Emperor has no clothes!” That is very uncomfortable for the keepers of the conventional wisdom, and they do not respond well to correction.

Did anyone follow the hash tag #CNNfail? The Tweets criticized CNN for ignoring the Iranian demonstrations for a whole evening. CNN broadcast stories about the failure of Six Flags because that would provide better U.S. audiences. Don’t exaggerate the expertise of the Main Stream Media or underestimate the power of the social media. It is more complex that just saying, “I’ll wait until the ‘real’ reporters tell me what truth is.”

2) I think that we need to start moving past the term “critical thinking.” It has become what I call and “essential elastic construct,” that is ad idea that is universally lauded but without firm definition. EEC’s leave people believing that they are talking about the same thing, and therefore buffer people and groups from oversight and/or conflict. But they serve to undermine substantive alignment or agreement because people don’t even realize that they are not talking about the same thing.

I’ve talking about critical and analytical thinking for 25 years. But I’ve come to think that even those who purportedly agree with me often do not. What do I mean when I write “critical thinking skills”? What do you mean when you use the term? Unfortunately, it is just too elastic a term, even though we agree that it stands for something essential.

3) I didn’t write up my observations, or do anything formally. I just shared with my friends and family, among whom there was vociferous disagreement through the primaries, that the patterns seemed pretty well set. All it took was comparing exit polls straight up. Nate Silver formalized it and refined it to the point that he could publicly make predictions with confidence, something that I didn’t have the time — or probably the expertise — to do.

My point was that flawed thinking of the talking heads was not universal, and that Nate Silver’s fundamental observation was not unique to him. (I, like many others, have lots of ideas that I throw out there with my friends and family but lack the expertise, time and/or attention span to truly develop. So, I’m happy to say that my private analysis was more accurate than that of most of the talking heads, but that is really more of a reflection of their lack of quality than any excess on my own part.) Silver’s accomplishments did not come from an initial brilliant observation about the race, but rather a pretty basic to which he applied his real expertise.

Sure. That’s why I added two links that provided some general information about his background. I also find him fascinating, as he provides a prime example of how applying similar techniques across disciplines can enhance our understanding of both the process of examining a specific problem, and the actual problem under examination. In very general terms, he provides a compelling example of the usefulness of a fresh perspective.

RE: “The odd thing in this comment thread is that people think that I am arguing against new media.”

Not my take at all. You seem to be arguing more for the value of a more tempered perspective when people declare something “revolutionary.” As you and others note — and I completely agree — true revolutions occur infrequently.

RE: “This is about not being so impressed by the flood of information that new media can provide that we forget that the same old lessons about taking in old media still apply.”

I would think that this is so obvious as to not need further argumentation. Critical thinking (hopefully) will never go out of fashion, although I will admit moments of despair when I see what passes for “analysis” of politics and current events from people who are paid because they have been judged to have expertise.

RE: “Quite a few of us saw that most of differences in the early primary/caucus states were attributable to demographics.”

Your phrasing here — especially the use of the word “us” — implies that you were directly involved in some of the more accurate analysis of raw data regarding the election. Have you written about this anywhere? I have found your contributions to this thread worthwhile, and would enjoy reading more — please, link to some of these posts. I’d love to read them.

Cheers,

Bill

He is, first and foremost, a methodological expertise. That is a legitimate field of expertise. His goal is to predict future performance by mining imperfect (e.g. noisy) indicators of past performance. He tries to finding underlying factors that might contribute to performance, figure out the relationships between them and the measure(s) of performance.

Nate — whose work I’ve been reading all decade — has not been a political expert, but more of an electoral expect. Actually, more a polling expert, if even that.

He has spent quite a bit of time learning more about polling during the last couple of years. And also about politics, yes. He’s been spending quite some time developing some new areas of expertise — and ongoing process. If you actually look at what he writes about, it is overwhelmingly based either upon his models or what he has learned from his models.

Most disciplines have established and accepted methodologies. Nate brings those from economics to the world of politics, mostly through polling, public opinion and elections. That’s where his expertise comes from.

As for his calling the election that others got wrong? Well, he was far from the only one. Quite a few of us saw that most of differences in the early primary/caucus states were attributable to demographics. The experts you think got it wrong were either employed by Clinton or people lacking in electoral or polling expertise. The usual talking head fools? Oh, please! Most of them are so far removed from their days as real journalists as to be laughable, and the rest have no such laurels to rest on.

Nate’s done great work, and added well to the debate. He’s raised the level of discourse, and minded the talking heads about evidence and the usefulness of arguments that actually depend upon it. He has demonstrated the value of expertise and knowing ones limits. His life story/professional history is an object lesson in how smart people can leverage their expertise in a variety of milieus, and even expand their areas of expertise in the process.

(Not that I’m an expert on Nate Silver or anything.)

The odd thing in this comment thread is that people think that I am arguing against new media. That is far from the case. Nate and his ilk have made for better baseball reading than most of the BBWAA (Jo Pos, excepted of course). Juan Cole has been a lot more informative and provided more context than ABC, or even NYTimes. This is about not being so impressed by the flood of information that new media can provide that we forget that the same old lessons about taking in old media still apply.

Another piece of the picture (that has yet to be covered anywhere near as well in the main stream media) is the story of internet traffic coming out of Iran: see http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2009/06/iranian-traffic-engineering/

Also, a few comments in this thread cite Nate Silver as a political expert. Well, he used to be a baseball expert, and then he applied similar methodologies to politics. I guess that made him a political amateur, until he did better than the professionals. See http://www.newsweek.com/id/140469 and http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/05/no-im-not-chuck-todd.html

In non-traditional media, the signal to noise ratio can get skewed. However, in traditional media, the bias behind much of what is reported as “news” can be hidden more effectively. Unless, of course, you’re Joe Scarborough and have to hawk Starbucks as a condition of your employment

All of these systems have a role to play in keeping the public informed, but the public also has a role to play in keeping these various systems honest.

Cheers,

Bill

I’m happy to clarify. I was suggesting that an overreliance on any one venue for information is imprudent since that company may go out of business just as easily as the Rocky Mountain News. That’s especially true when these new communication outlets have no business model whatsoever.

I apologize for my comments on this blog post. Please feel free to remove them.

Gary

To me, the power of instant news lies in the people who are sending the information. Their hope that the world sees what’s going on there might simply be the motivation they need to keep demonstrating. It’s a way to defeat the totalitarian premise that their protests will not be heard. So actually, they really don’t need us to understand, just to listen.

BUT…my concern is that we (the listeners) are instructed by our human nature to gawk at accidents and be continually distracted by the latest shiny object that comes into view. Having so much “news” appear all at once so conveniently is stimulating, but is obviously less than informative.

We love a train wreck, whether it’s Housewives of New Jersey or dramatic footage of anything far far away.

It’s just as true now as it ever was to understand that not everything we see is true or of equal importance. After a while, CNN putting “Breaking News” on every story becomes a farce. After a while, most of us not directly involved with Iran will be distracted by some other story. And what happens in Iran will fade into the background, just like millions of untwittered tragedies in Bangladesh, Darfur, or Detroit.

So while this raw news feed should of course make us think about what news and journalism mean, it also should be seen as a way a rich, bored society amuses itself.