It’s always hard to know, with a live election night model, whether you’ve got things set up too conservatively or too aggressively. (all times EST), Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight’s editor-in-chief, tweeted: But just after polls began closing on Election Night, the whiplash set in. ![]() The day before Election Day, FiveThirtyEight’s final poll-based projection gave the Democrats an 86 percent chance of retaking the House. It was the latter that most clearly showed just how problematic these real-time projections can be. The same goes for the projection that ABC News’ data sub-site, FiveThirtyEight, rolled out Tuesday night. ![]() “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.”īut the tipoff 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. Will be accessible via a module on the home page, although perhaps not as prominently as in 2016. Kahn said the House and Senate projection needles And the paper’s managing editor, Joe Kahn, also told Vanity Fair that the needle would be de-emphasized online as well. 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. So, not surprisingly, it spawned competitors for the 2018 midterm elections. 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. Every one of its shifts, left or right, was soon breathlessly reported elsewhere online and on cable TV. Whether you loved or hated it, the needle’s captivating showmanship made an instant impact. A gimmick within a gimmick, in other words, whose only real mission was to keep its online audience glued to its perambulations. 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.Īs 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. On election night 2016, the New York Times prominently deployed on its homepage a supposed gauge of presidential fortunes. 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. ![]() On TV, this has evolved into things like hologram pundits, as well as the ubiquitous, massive touch screens that dominate every studio. If political journalism has become increasingly about polls and the horse race, election night coverage has grown to be more and more about flashy gimmicks and real-time scoreboard watching. 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 last Tuesday can attest. 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. ![]() Projecting winners in individual races based on official returns, exit polls and precincts left to report is one thing. 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? Of course, it’s easy to say: Just report the election results, and put it into context. On election night, what’s the proper role for political journalism?
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