Ready for More Hot Air?

Yesterday, my sister sent me a story by James Fallows, who has been floating around the Fake News universe since leaving the Carter White House in 1979. This particular story takes a critical look at how the liberal print media is constantly promoting narratives about politics based on rumors and predictions which turn out not to be true.

To quote Fallows, “what has happened [in the mid-terms] appears to be entirely at odds with what the political-reporter cadre — the people whose entire job is predicting and pre-explaining political trends — had been preparing the public for.” And he then goes on to say that the results were far less of a Democratic wipeout than what had been predicted by either side.

The bottom line, according to Fallows, is that the people making political predictions these days were so off-base that if they were weather forecasters predicting the weather, or business analysts predicting changes in the market, or epidemiologists predicting the next serious illness, we would tell them all to go out and look for other jobs.

What’s the cure for how often the political pundits seen to be missing the boat? Fallows say they should stop predicting and instead “invest more in looking into, sharing, and learning from what is actually going on.”