The New York Times 'Needle' and the Damage Done
CNN's Jake Tapper maintains that the midterm elections were "not a blue
wave." Democrats are expected to pick up in excess of 35 seats in the House.
(YouTube screen grab)
On Election Night, what's the proper role for political journalism?
Of course, it's easy to say: Just report the election results, and put it
into context. But what happens when corporate media-in their zeal to give
the public the big picture (and to draw eyeballs)-get too far ahead of the
actual facts?
Projecting winners in individual races based on official returns, exit polls
and precincts left to report is one thing. But extrapolating early results
to make broad leaps in logic about what will happen hours later, across
dozens of states where polls haven't even closed yet, is quite another. That
can be a reckless gambit, one that doesn't take much to turn supposedly
"objective" data journalism into flawed, rank speculation, as anyone closely
following the whipsawing Election Night media narrative on Tuesday can
attest.
If political journalism has become increasingly about polls and the
horserace, Election Night coverage has grown to be more and more about
flashy gimmicks and real-time scoreboard watching. On TV, this has evolved
into things like hologram pundits, as well as the ubiquitous, massive
touchscreens that dominate every studio. There's also been a corresponding
push online to create eye-catching dashboards that let you know not just who
is ahead right now, but who will likely end up winning at the end of the
night. Which brings us to "the needle."
On Election Night 2016, the New York Times prominently deployed on its
homepage a supposed gauge of presidential fortunes. The needle's now
infamous journey, from heavily favoring the odds of Hillary Clinton to
preferring Donald Trump as the night went on, notoriously sent chills
through many Times readers and the punditocracy.
As did its nerve-wracking "jitter," which was-tellingly-an artificially
added dramatic element to make the needle look like it was constantly
responding to new inputs. A gimmick within a gimmick, in other words, whose
only real mission was to keep its online audience glued to its
perambulations.
Whether you loved or hated it, the needle's captivating showmanship made an
instant impact. Every one of its shifts, left or right, was soon
breathlessly reported elsewhere online and on cable TV. Never mind the
oversimplified nature (and ethical complications), it soon became the
journalistic totem of 2016 Election Night coverage, sublimating reporting on
down-ballot races and the policy implications of a Trump win under a torrent
of mindless needle-watching. So, not surprisingly, it spawned competitors
for the 2018 midterm elections.
Sensitive to the many criticisms of the needle, however, the New York Times
did make a number of changes to how it deployed its dual projection
needles-one for control of the House, one for the Senate-heading into
Tuesday Night. Gone was the fake jitter, for one. And the paper's managing
editor, Joe Kahn, also told Vanity Fair in a story from Monday (11/5/18)
that the needle would be de-emphasized online as well Kahn said the House
and Senate projection needles
"
will be accessible via a module on the home page, although perhaps not as
prominently as in 2016. "We expect it to generate a lot of attention," he
said, "and to be a really useful early indicator of which way things are
going."
But the tip off here are the words "attention" and "early indicator."
Though the needles' projections are based on "intensive,
precinct-by-precinct data," according to Kahn, that doesn't change that its
fundamental missions are to drive traffic and time-on-page by essentially
trying to get ahead of the facts. The same goes for the projection that ABC
News' data sub-site, FiveThirtyEight, rolled out Tuesday night.
It was the latter that most clearly showed just how problematic these
real-time projections can be. The day before Election Day, FiveThirtyEight's
final poll-based projection gave the Democrats an 86 percent chance of
retaking the House. But just after polls began closing on Election Night,
the whiplash set in. At 7:48 pm (all times EST), Nate Silver,
FiveThirtyEight's editor-in-chief, tweets:
"
It's always hard to know, with a live election night model, whether you've
got things set up too conservatively or too aggressively. But our model
really likes how things are going for Democrats in the House so far.
But just a half-hour later, after some discouraging results from Florida,
FiveThirtyEight's model had suddenly cut in half the Democrats' chances of
retaking the House, to 39.3 percent.
Other sites that follow FiveThirtyEight echoed its projections in turn. Just
minutes later, at 8:24 pm, the popular Twitter account Political Polls
(@PPollingNumbers) sent out a tweet-that quickly went viral-estimating the
odds of a House Democratic majority had slipped to 30 percent.
The failed blue wave media narrative then spread like wildfire. CNN
panelists David Axelrod and Van Jones immediately bought into this
pessimistic narrative to proclaim "no blue wave," as did Jake Tapper, after
a tough-to-flip Kentucky House seat was called for the Republican incumbent
in the 8:00 hour. Fox News' Geraldo Rivera likewise tweeted "no wave" at
8:34 pm. The mainstream media's conventional wisdom on the 2018 midterms
outcome was already being cast, in other words, while many of the country's
polling stations were still open.
We now know this narrative wasn't just premature, it was flat wrong.
Notably, the Times had yet to launch its projection needles at this point in
the evening, due to "technical difficulties," according to Times polling
expert Nate Cohn. And then Silver chimed in on Twitter to acknowledge
volatility flaws in his model:
"
Well, I'm trying to do six things at once-we think our live Election Day
forecast is definitely being too aggressive and are going to put it on a
more conservative setting where it waits more for projections/calls instead
of making inferences from partial vote counts.
It wasn't just the political press bubble being affected, however. When
FiveThirtyEight's shockingly rosy projection for the Republicans went
public, bond traders in London reacted in something of a momentary panic. As
the Financial Times (11/8/18) explains, the prospect of two more years of
unified GOP control in Washington, DC, sent US government bonds skyrocketing
between 8 and 9 pm (1 to 2 am, Greenwich time). "At one point," FT reported,
"the ten-year fetched a yield of 3.24 percent. The two-year, 2.95 percent (a
level not breached since the global financial crisis)."
Whoopsie daisy?!
And while the transparency shown by Cohn and Silver is admirable, their mea
culpas prompt a deeper question about the journalistic value of models that
purport to peer into the future so fully. Especially if these models can so
easily make bold guesses that defy common sense and don't wait for the
actual facts on the ground.
Though dozens of competitive races were still yet to be called,
FiveThirtyEight's model pretty quickly backtracked, and turned more
favorable toward the Democrats. As a result, at 9:11pm, Political Polls
tweeted out that the odds of a Democratic House takeover were 50/50. Same
site, a mere 33 minutes later, after the Times needle debuted and
FiveThirtyEight had swung back to favor Democrats: "BREAKING NEWS! DEMS WILL
GAIN CONTROL OF THE HOUSE FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2010."
To recap, in the span of 80 minutes on Election Night, the odds of a
Democratic takeover of the House went from a roughly 2-1 underdog bet to
50/50 to fait accompli.
But even then, the Times and FiveThirtyEight projections kept on
underestimating the Democrats' wide-ranging successes. Only after a day, and
armed with the luxury of time and and a much more comprehensive list of
actual results, did Nate Cohn (11/8/18) finally capture the broad and deep
impact of Tuesday's "blue wave" in a thoughtful and incisive analysis of the
election. Or, as Silver himself admitted on Twitter on Wednesday, Election
Nights have so many moving parts and stressors that "it's easy to make both
Type I (overreaction) and Type II (under-reaction) errors."
In the end, it defies reality to think that this past Tuesday's
media-manufactured rollercoaster ride was in any way representative of the
real-world prospects of the Democrats on Election Night. In fact, Tuesday's
results were notable for how closely they tracked pre-Election Day polling,
and how the final number of Democratic pick-ups-somewhere between 34 and 37
House seats at this point-fell in line with so many middle-of-the-road,
simple math analyses. The net effect: Those who had ignored these
projections altogether on Election Night, and just waited to read the final
vote tallies the day after, would've have likely been better informed than
someone who was glued to the falsely fluctuating flutters-and resulting
pundit overreactions-all night long.
As a result, it's hard to point to any substantial, net positive
journalistic value from these catchy but problematic projection models
during this past-or any-Election Night. Both ABC News and the Times should
take a long, hard look at whether all that traffic they're getting is worth
potentially betraying their readers-and the whole media ecosystem with
them-for a supposed peek into a future that won't ever exist.
Reed Richardson / FAIR
