The Republican Horse Race Is Over, and Journalism Lost

[WestVirginiaRebel]

NY Times:

Wrong, wrong, wrong — to the very end, we got it wrong.

 

Just a couple of weeks ago, political prognosticators in television and print media were describing Indiana as the “most important test” for Donald J. Trump and a “firewall” where Ted Cruz “should do well.” It was one of those states Mr. Cruz could have used to force the likely — if not “guaranteed” — prospect of a contested convention in Cleveland, where, boy, were we in for a spectacular show.

 

Still more recently — as in Tuesday — the data journalist Nate Silver, who founded the FiveThirtyEight website, gave Hillary Clinton a 90 percent chance of beating Bernie Sanders in Indiana. Mr. Sanders won by a comfortable margin of about five percentage points.

 

You can continue to blame all the wrong calls this year on new challenges in telephone polling when so many Americans — especially the young — do not have landlines and are therefore hard to track down. Or you can blame the unpredictability of an angry and politically peripatetic electorate.

 

But in the end, you have to point the finger at national political journalism, which has too often lost sight of its primary directives in this election season: to help readers and viewers make sense of the presidential chaos; to reduce the confusion, not add to it; to resist the urge to put ratings, clicks and ad sales above the imperative of getting it right.

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Let the self-flagellation begin...