Learning about B2B sales over the years, the size of this leadership-change factor has been among the most eye-opening (and among the most disappointing).
It cuts both ways: You can have a successful pilot that doesn't proceed because this-or-that VP was replaced, and to show off their bold new direction, the new VP cancels almost everything novel the previous person started. Or you can reach out just at the moment the new guy or gal comes in, right when they're looking for the pieces of their bold new direction, and you become part of that.
I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy. Alas. At least I have been fortunate enough to experience both directions in quantities that roughly balance out.
My experience is that it's the opposite: the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy. At more successful companies, it basically doesn't matter what the executives do, because the company's moat is so big that it can tolerate grotesque mismanagement and still make money. (This is the converse of the old aphorism "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."). Executives seem extremely uncomfortable with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars and yet nothing they do matters, and so they're intent on leaving their mark. Thus, they cancel all the pet projects of the past management, instill their own ideas, and boldly take the company in a new direction. Except not really, because the fundamental parts of the business that make it work are all handled by people 8 levels down in the org chart whose job functions are considered common sense by everybody and never really up for discussion.
At least, this was my experience at Google, which is perhaps the best money-making machine ever invented and yet is grotesquely mismanaged by mid-level VPs that cancel every promising new product that comes out, only to start their own initiatives that themselves get canceled by their successors.
- Career progression is still a motivation. If there are enough sufficiently motivated people in the organization (whether they come from upper management, middle management, or frontline workers), leaders need to harness that motivation and move it in a direction and potentially dole out career rewards. Otherwise, that motivation that is not properly harnessed can be destructive.
- Similar to the previous hypothesis, they might axed _because_ nothing they do matters. So they may thrash about, making enough noise and movement to convince enough people that they might actually be doing something important, and it would be risky to dismiss them from their position.
- Turf wars/politics/etc. If you do "nothing", then you look replaceable. If you're just a very expensive paper-weight, someone may try to usurp your highly-paid paperweight position. Thus, the nash equilibrium is to do something that makes your position less likely to be usurped by making it look difficult or that you are uniquely qualified to do it.Apple's Liquid Glass comes to mind.
The design exec responsible suddenly left Apple for Meta, a company rather less esteemed for design, and Apple still hasn't acknowledged this failure or backtracked.
My job involves service contracts for the cloud. We get to know workloads and optimize them and learn how to troubleshoot them to reduce mitigation time.
I had a big customer go from "must have, non-negotiable" for my team to a non-renewal in weeks when a new CTO came in. Within a month, they had an outage we could have mitigated quickly and had our yearly contract pay for itself.
I've been unlucky enough to work under several executives who thought they could resist direction from the CEO and board. They pushed their pet projects and thought leadership would eventually see the light. Instead they got ejected from the company and replaced with someone who knew how to follow orders.
My cynical assumption when I first saw this was that it was all just politics, but I have to admit that life is so much easier when your management chain isn't fighting uphill all the time. If the CEO and board want the company working on some things and not others, you're on thin ice if your manager is assigning you to go against the company's direction. It's scarier when you may not even know what they're doing to you.
For this specific case, completely pulling the content offline feels like a loss across the board. I could see it happening as an overreaction, to send a message that the new management is serious about not repeating the (perceived or otherwise) mistakes of their predecessors with an unmistakable signal
Anyone tied to the old regime that isn't immediately, obviously, and hugely beneficial to the top of the new ranks is scrapped. Business arrangements and government contracts have to be re-negotiated to cut in new leadership. If business owners don't hedge on both sides, and get in there immediately after the election, they become castigated as loyal to the old regime, leading to more friction, costs, and work to simply get back to normal operations.
Ironically, your comment adds nothing to the discussion other than virtue signaling that you're "in the know" on this subject.
But it does bring up a good point. That too many people are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Any reasonable person does, or ought to know, the cycle 538 went through. And we need to stop giving the benefit of the doubt to reasonable people who say "well I'm the one who didn't"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selling_out
"While this perceived inauthenticity is viewed with scorn and contempt by members of the subculture, the definition of the term and to whom it should be applied is subjective. While the term is most associated with the 1970s- and 1980s-era punk and hardcore subculture, English use of the term originates in the late 19th century."
> I’ve always had a fairly entrepreneurial spirit
but that doesn't square well with being a cog in the huge Disney machine.
Virtue signalling is a funny term. What, exactly, does it mean here? In what way is reminiscing about a venture that lasted 15 years of your life "virtue signalling"? It seems to be that word is trotted out as a meaningless cliche, something in the sense of "I don't like this thing, but I'll sound more sophisticated if I accuse it of this nebulous bad thing rather than just saying I don't like it".
The man is allowed to write a blog post about the final conclusion of a huge phase of his life. You don't have to give him your sympathy, but there's nothing wrong with writing about it.
And portraying oneself as having independence and grit when one doesn't actually (which I don't concede happened here) is not what virtue signaling is. "Virtue" here more closely means "morality" than "admirable or sympathetic qualities". Virtue signaling is disingenuously behaving like you are a moral person because it is advantageous, when in fact you lack such morals.
I feel the need to belabor this because accusations of virtue signaling are too often unfounded and amount to a cheap trick to shut down more thoughtful discussion.
All it really amounts to is an accusation of insincerity motivated by vanity, which is a two-for-one ad hominem attack that allows the accuser to avoid responding to the actual point.
Sometimes you get an offer that is financially irresistible. And after thousands of hours of hard work you finally get some reward.
Betrayed? That’s why people have lawyers to let them draft really good contract proposal so they aren’t ripped off.
But public whining is somehow a common tactic for getting attention online :)
Because it works. Not all the time, but a significant number of times. Public backlash from a fanbase is a lot cheaper than a legal battle.
We're well into the attention economy these days. I don't blame someone for using the tools society dealt out to its effect.
A mature person would be disappointed, vent to their close friends/spouse, and then shut up about it. They wouldn't publish a long blog post to air their grievances.
Might want to think about selling that one to Disney as well and then writing about your great regrets of selling your substack on substack v2 in ten years, that's gotta be amazing content for another ten posts
The core problem here seems to be that the visions of the buyers were not aligned with Nate Silver's vision. He wanted to continue having a blog on esoteric statistics, but with the resources of a news network. They may have wanted to have a news network, and acquire it at the price of a blog on esoteric statistics. This wasn't a loss-leading "feather in the cap" for Disney, but a bet that simply didn't pay off and needed to be put out to pasture.
And the firing of the staff happened years ago and people broadly understood even if they did not agree with it.
The recent decision was to take down an archive that cost $8 in server resources and was still bringing in page views and ad revenue.
The real lesson for both sides is to not divorce “creatives” from the business. Arguably that’s one of the biggest mistakes of legacy media and why platforms like YouTube have been so successful: creatives run the business. There’s not a long complicated feedback loop between creatives / business decisions.
From Wikipedia.
We used to have laws and limits regarding media ownership. One company couldn’t own every radio station in most of America. Distributors couldn’t own studios. Etc.
Disney should never have been allowed to buy 538 in the first place. ABC, possibly…? But Disney shouldn't be allowed to own ABC!! (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!)
The state we’re in is not normal and it wasn’t necessary and we don’t have to just live with it if we don’t want to.
I would argue Clinton's presidency moved the Democrats from a center-left party to a center-right party, given its platform of welfare reform and free trade at the expense of labor rights and the social safety net.
Neoliberal ideals are really good at keeping a machine running in the direction it's already going. And we arguably needed that with Biden for a short spell. It's never going to change the direction of the machine, though. And we're heading off a cliff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996
It passed with support from both parties in both the House and Senate.
Can’t speak for everyone else, but it wasn’t this for me. It was about 2016 presidential that lost me.
He tries to justify this later about how theirs was better than other outlets but I don’t care. Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want, but regardless I had zero interest in reading any of their predictions or analyses after that.
Not even mad, just that to my experience they had one job and they didn’t fulfill it at the most important time. They went from appearing insightful to just one opinion amongst so many others.
Elections, like many things, have some inherent uncertainty. A several point polling error is normal, so a candidate who is down a couple points on election day has a decent shot of winning.
I feel like the correct strategy for 538 when it was actually niche was to be precise, but then it went viral and maybe should've hit the IDK button much harder and more often after that.
People don't like seeing a 95% chance of winning and then losing. The game tweaks the odds, so certain thresholds become gimmes (something like "if the displayed odds are better than 75%, treat them as 100%").
I've even heard things like "70% chance of Hillary winning means she gets 70% of the votes!" (and tangentially, my far-too-long argument with someone on Reddit who insisted "there is no way in hell 50% of the people in this town make above the median income"...)
In the end, it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard, and that for all the fanfare, FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper, so it kinda lost its appeal.
FiveThirtyEight gave Trump double the odds of the next highest reputable prediction, which was The New York Times Upshot (15%). Princeton Election Consortium gave Trump less than 1%.
That is not "only slightly better" to anyone who's statistically literate.
A FiveThirtyEight reader in 2016 was significantly better calibrated regarding Clinton’s chances than a reader of other reputable newspapers.
538 was about analyzing and communicating the information from those polls in an easily accessible form. If you came to the site for that, you weren't mad that they "predicted poorly something that was impossible to predict from the data sources they used" ... you were just mad at Trump for winning (despite polls suggesting otherwise).
So maybe we shouldn't be doing it. The value of predicting an election in the large out in public seems kind of dubious, and it's more like gambling than actually being useful. A candidate only runs, and continues running, if they think they can win. All predictions like these do is confuse voters leading up to election day and while they are voting. It keep candidates from making strong cases for their platform, keeps the voters from listening to the candidates' platforms, and encourages team-based partisan politics.
In 2024 the single most likely outcome his model had was trump winning all 7 swing states. The second most likely was Harris winning all 7.
Now you might say that it was on me as a consumer to understand this in 2016, but I remember the look of total shock on Nate Silver’s face when he called the winner on live TV that night, so clearly he didn’t really understand it either. Lesson learned for all of us, I guess.
I would be fascinated to know how you model a coin flip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight#2016_U.S._elec...
> Being dismissive of Trump’s chances early on in the Republican primary was the biggest analytical mistake of my career, and I think I deserved a lot of blame for that.
He went on to write a whole retrospective, which is exactly what you'd want to see:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160527093831/https://fivethirt...
So unless your standard is "pollsters must be perfect at all times", I dunno what else should be asked of Silver here.
A key thing though is 538 did regularly test the calibration their models: https://web.archive.org/web/20190410030104/https://fivethirt...
> "What you’ll find, though, is that our calibration has generally been very, very good. For instance, out of the 5,589 events (between sports and politics combined) that we said had a 70 chance of happening (rounded to the nearest 5 percent), they in fact occurred 71 percent of the time. Or of the 55,853 events that we said had about a 5 percent chance of occurring, they happened 4 percent of the time."
But yes I'll join you with the liver damage and drink 17 shots.
What if they had said 49%? Would that have made their prediction worthless?
the turnout-of-demographic-groups-based election model is surely the underlying intelligence failure here.
A model that predicts a 30% chance of winning the election will be wrong 1 out of 3 times, which is not quite a coin flip but close enough.
All he (or anyone) can do is interpret or analyse poll results, and then surface their findings in a way a larger audience can understand. 538 did that better than any other poll analyst ... but they all got it wrong because the polls themselves were faulty.
TLDR; You can't get water from a stone, and no one (not even Nate Silver) can get perfectly accurate predictions from (inherently flawed) polls!
538 made very clear with this analogy that both Trump and the Cavs were underdogs, and that both had a solid chance of winning.
It doesn't help that the US has a terrible election system that often leads to small margins in some states being decisive.
I know I'm being super conspiratorial here but why wouldn't all forecasters predict just between 30% - 70%? That way if they're "right" they can take the credit for it and if they're wrong they can say "well, we weren't that wrong". That's probably what I'd do anyway...
Also there's more going in those forecasts besides just the "% chance to win". There's expected results in terms of %'s of the vote for the candidates, and that's what people tend to focus on for actually analyzing your performance and credibility after the fact.
You getting the outcome correct but being off by 20 points on the margin is a much worse performance than you getting the outcome wrong but being within 0.5 points of the margin. (ex: Results are 49.75/50.25, you predicted 30/70, another outlet predicted 50.25/49.75).
For anyone making many predictions, you can analyze the outcomes to see how accurate those percentages are.
For anyone making few predictions, you should never trust their track record even if it's technically perfect.
FiveThirtyEight had Trump at a 30% chance of winning, and he won. The model wasn't wrong. The less likely of two outcomes occurred. Even if they'd had him at 1% they still wouldn't technically have been wrong though I think complaints might be more warranted.
If they had Trump at 49% would you have still been angry? What about at 51%? Would it have been okay then?
If a coin flip is the necessary mental model to remind you both things can happen, then sure.
People just love horse race coverage. Silver gave us the most accurate horse race coverage. Maybe the lesson is stop following horse race coverage.
But most people went back to the tea leave readers. That way when the election was over, it can justifiably be the charlatan's fault that viewers got over-invested in their predictive capabilities.
But at the same time I do think it’s valid to say it’s more than a coin flip. The polling data over the election cycle showed that Trump had a smaller but still legitimate chance of winning. The data was different in 2020, when he lost.
If you guessed a "two", and it landed on "two, I wouldn't really be that impressed, even though there was an 83% probability going against you.
Yep definitely all those.
Why is it so hard to admit 30% is not 0%?
We would need a pass from the mods lol.
What made me mad is Nate seemed to turn into a MAGA troll himself after that election.
This is why efforts like Internet Archive and others are so important. Whatever you think of 538, it _is_ history, and in this digital world it needs to be preserved.
I cannot tell you how much of my professional career I have seen this play out again and again and again.
There is an "executive class" in this country that has never had a real job or done real work. They were born to privilege, they went to elite schools, got their first check from a major consultancy, and then spend their whole career bouncing from C-suite to C-suite. They stare at slides all day, occasionally make a meaningful decision, and more or less spend their time insulating themselves from failure.
This may not describe everyone in charge at every major company, but it describes enough to explain why everything in our economy just feels like it's piggybacking off of a handful of actually good businesses.
Only it's worse this time. Say what you want about those French poofs and British lords: they were expected to do their duty on the battlefield.
I'll chime in tangentially with another large part: the disproportionate share of both asset and liquid wealth held by people who are some combination of a) Baby Boomers, b) in the top percentiles of wealth/income, c) politically- or socially-connected. As you say, it's not all of them, but enough of them. At the confluence of the two groups is a desire not to invest in potentially risky ventures, or to spend on consumption, but instead to put as much money as possible into a narrow band of low-risk, often passive investments, and to pull every lever possible to protect those investments, even when they become outmoded in some regard and the income stream or economic activity that supports their high (growing) valuation dries up.
Supporting this paradigm (ostensibly so that seniors don't die in poverty, so that strategically-important businesses and ventures are backstopped, etc., but, crucially, to the detriment of all other concerns) means an erosion of a sort of "constructive inefficiency": "wasted" spending on ventures that might not work out, on employees who are not the best and most productive, on niche services and products, which altogether represent a massive share of potential economic activity that is much better at involving and supporting a diverse population with diverse needs and diverse skill sets that perhaps have not yet found the correct outlet to produce maximal value.
Your C-suite goons and my rich, highly networked seniors don't care about the potential of a paradigm shift to support and enable short-term losers, though. They just want to pile into the sure-thing of your "actually good businesses" (which, in many cases, aren't actually that good).
I've been burned too many times subscribing to services that go to shit because the owner wanted their payday. Let's stop (only) blaming the buyer.
I personally don't love ESPN/Disney/ABC, but basically all major corporations that make acquisitions do this. Google does it all the time. It's very clearly a known risk when you sell a startup. I don't have much sympathy.
I replied to your comment, and now you've replied to two other threads I've commented in reiterating that Nate is a sore loser who deserves what he got and he should have expected this. To be honest, it sounds like you have some kind of personal grievance with him. His post doesn't come off like he wasn't expecting this outcome, or that it's devastating him. He mentions that he is significantly happier now having gone back to blogging than he was at Disney. It's just a blog post, about a big era of his life, which is now over with. He's human. He can feel disappointed that 15 years of his work was taken offline, and reminisce about the ways things went wrong, both on his and his employer's end.
It's amazing that they trot out Sees Candy every year for the shareholders' meeting when they own GEICO.
It seems that Disney isn't doing this quite right.
Services & retailing: Ben Bridge Jeweler, Business Wire, Dairy Queen, McLane Company, NetJets, Oriental Trading Company, Pampered Chef, See's Candies, Star Furniture, WPLG
Manufacturing: Benjamin Moore & Co., Clayton Homes, CTB International, Duracell, Fruit of the Loom, Johns Manville, Lubrizol, Precision Castparts Corp, Scott Fetzer Company, Garan Inc
And all of those have declined in reputation since their acquisition or soon after.
Disney bought ESPN in 1996, Marvel in 2009 (literally had 2 movies released here and one of them flopped) and Pixar in 2006.
For Pixar, they and Disney were joined at the hip even before acquisition. Besides distribution rights, Disney had full sequel rights to almost all of Pixar's catalogue at the time. Disney could have made a sequel to Finding Nemo, The Incredibles etc even without Pixar's blessing or involvement. There is quite literally no Pixar without Disney.
Marvel? Their most successful years were under Disney. ESPN did not become the media empire you know it as until well after Disney's acquisition either.
I’ll grant you that “soon after” might have been a stretch for ESPN, but it’s obviously true for the others. Almost all of Pixar’s most enduring films had their start before Disney bought the company. The same is true with Marvel. Sure, Disney’s fanfare might have played before the Avengers films, but those movies were the brainchild of Kevin Fiege, who was already in charge before the Disney purchase. You can maybe claim Disney has a good eye for finding companies on an upward trajectory, but these are all examples of Disney management’s failure to be a long-term steward of their acquisitions.
Disney has never given a single f*ck about that reputation, but the chiefs who agree to these acquisitions never had to care about that.
It's way too late for that to be possible any more.
I can see why they wouldn't be a priority to keep up. For archival purposes, I'd think everything is still in the internet archive?
Nate seems to try to justify this a touch, saying he personally was looking for a specific article. Kind of a special case there…
I encourage anyone who thinks this is true to actually look for things in the internet archive and report back success. If you have the original exact URL you might be able to easily find something in the wayback machine, but if you have only a vague inclination that something existed and a general timeframe, it's a needle in a haystack. The wayback machine is, also extremely slow to retrieve data.
"Random sample of Internet links" is going to include a lot of absolute garbage.
If we're talking about news sites, or commentary, or blogs, or magazines, or newspapers, or other publishers, the number of dead links will be far higher. Those are the types of sites that are likely to fail, be acquired, get migrated, or become paywalled.
I worked as a technology journalist for years starting in the late 90s. I did a lot of freelance work as well, and almost nothing survives online. There were media brands that were shut down, content migrated to another site, the CMS was migrated from Drupal to Wordpress to something else, there were two or three acquisitions, and so on. Last week, I checked some articles that I worked on between 3 and 10 years ago and they were either 404s or paywalled.
When I left one of the higher-profile pubs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew my articles wouldn't last even though they were migrated to a sister publication. I made PDF copies of every single one. I still have them in a folder somewhere, not sure what to do with them.
My personal blogs are still up, but even those will die at some point.
It's also likely to include a lot of non-content links, e.g. links to index and navigation pages, interstitials, search results, user profiles, image galleries, etc. These sorts of links don't reliably address specific content, and it's natural that they'll change or die over time. This doesn't necessarily mean that anything valuable has been lost.
https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026
(when able, please consider donating to the Internet Archive; they are the durable, long term storage system of last resort)
> Yes, you can still access (for now) Disney-era FiveThirtyEight content via the invaluable Internet Archive, and pre-Disney-era content from The New York Times (which I partnered with from 2010 through 2013). And obviously, we’re trying to recreate some of the most popular parts of FiveThirtyEight at Silver Bulletin. The election models and polling averages are here, and new-and-improved versions of the sports models (PELE, ELWAY, COOPER) are gradually returning too.2 Galen Druke, Clare Malone and I have even been getting the old podcast crew back together for live shows.
With regards to:
> When I left one of the higher-profile pubs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew my articles wouldn't last even though they were migrated to a sister publication. I made PDF copies of every single one. I still have them in a folder somewhere, not sure what to do with them.
May I suggest:
https://help.archive.org/help/uploading-a-basic-guide/
You can upload them all as a single item, or as individual items per piece and asking IA Patron Services to create a collection for you.
> My personal blogs are still up, but even those will die at some point.
Drop links, and they will be queued for crawling, if not already archived. If you would like to self serve, https://web.archive.org/save
Hard to get sympathy here.
No surprises here, no sympathy from me, and his blog post reads like he's a sore loser.
(Disney sucks and isn't blameless, but this is very much a standard business practice.)
538 was purchased and then left to wither and die where as Disney seems intent on squeezing every last penny from the Star Wars franchise by using the IP as much as possible
In polling circles, the voters tend to be segmented into high and low propensity voters. High propensity voters will always vote. Low propensity voters won't. But the differences are often so small the results can flip on unexpected turnout in just one segment of the voters.
As an example, the 2024 election turned on 3 big factors:
1. Millions of Biden voters in 2020 stayed home. Affordability was the biggest factor but there are were other huge factors too, most notably Palestine;
2. Trump retained the white vote while increasing his share of the Hispanic vote; and
3. Trump activated younger, low-propensity voters. You'll often osee this described as the "podcast sphere". We're talking the people who end up in alt-right pipeline on Youtube and in podcasts (eg Andrew Tate).
Most recent presidential elections come down the results in about 7-8 states. The other 42-43 are known before you go in with some rare exceptions. The most recent exception was Obama in 2008 who won Iowa, for example. Other big sweeps were Reagan in 1984 and Nixon in 1972.
So, with a modern election you can just flip a coin 7 times and you have a 1 in 128 chance of just being correct, 50 out of 50. This is why you need to show your work with any prediction modeling and polling. You need to show how you reached your prediction in terms of turnout as well as how major demographics will vote.
Every election cycle complicates this with external factors and per-state issues. Covid loomed large over 2020 but it also made voting easier than ever, with easy access to early voting and mail-in voting. This changes the high and low propensity voter math significantly. Also, the Arizona legislature went on a mission to punish Native Americans for flipping Arizona blue in 2020 by disenfranchising Native Americans in subsequent elections in many, many ways.
So what tends to happen is that results are close enough that it become s abit of a guess. No pollster wants to be an outlier AND wrong so there's a convergence to mean thing that happens where they all tend to make the same prediction because everybody being wrong is way better, optically, than you being wrong and everyone else being right.
Add to all this, population sampling used to be done on landlines decades ago. Now we just don't have an equivalent and if your sampling algorithm is off, your results are off. Garbage in, garbage out.
I guess my point is that Nate Silver got kinda lucky in 2012 and came back to Earth in 2016 so I've never been that impressed and honestly I jus tdon't care if 538 exists or not.
Absolutely not. Creating a culture where employees are expected to be silent about their (mis)treatment by wealthy owners is only favorable, to, well, wealthy owners. Business is business, so why is it unprofessional to point out they're bad at business?
If a company wants to buy another company and sunset it, that's a normal business practice. I get that it's disappointing, but in no way is this "mistreatment." At least to me, this is a perfectly normal business situation that doesn't merit this level of complaining. It reads as an ex-employee being petty.
> What happened in 2024 isn’t something I’d have scripted, though. Basically, their new election model was literally broken, continuing to show Joe Biden virtually tied with Trump even after his disastrous debate. (Evidently because Morris’s design for it had been overcomplicated. These models are hard to design, by the way.)
What mainstream press outlet has moved leftwards? I can't think of any, and I certainly am interested in knowing which those might be. Inversely, cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward in the last 10 years.
It and https://mediabiasfactcheck.com say NYTimes “leans left” and is “left-center” respectively.
What’s an example that you believe highlights NYTimes moving rightward?
The treatment of Mamdani for one, or Hochul/Cuomo.
>say NYTimes “leans left” and is “left-center” respectively.
That can be true and at the same time it can be moving rightward.
Look at their coverage of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's response to a question about Taiwan versus Trump's response to a question about Taiwan. In the first case, their quote included all of the um's and other similar pauses in answering the question. In the second case, their quote of Trump cleaned up all of those artifacts. The end result is that it looks like AOC is flailing to come up with an answer while Trump has a clean, polished answer. But if you compare the actual audio clips of both answers, Trump's answer is the one that involves far more flailing to come up with a response.
There is a general pattern in the more subtle aspects of presentation and framing that generally excuse the behaviors of right-wing politicians compared to the same actions being done by a left-wing politician.
As the Overton window or activist left moves further left on issues like identity politics, crime and free speech (1619 Project era at NYT, staff revolts etc), steady coverage can appear "righter" by comparison without actually changing
Overton window has definitely shifted to the right. Beign a normal person who values science is now considered "leftist". Its nuts.
Oh yeah, venerable institutions like the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and the like? Or maybe you mean the TV news organizations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar, or Hearst? Or maybe cable news organizations like CNN or Fox News?
The narrative of the "liberal media" is so out of date it makes you look out of touch. The mainstream media is captured by billionaire interests and has been so for years now.
What? Media in the USA has staggered to the right over the past ten years. The only reason it was called liberal before that was because one party used facts and data and the other preferred to rig the system against the common people. While Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias" it's joke only in that the conservative viewpoint today seems focused on imaginary problems and denying the existence of real ones.
Video (queued up): https://youtu.be/IJ-a2KeyCAY?t=270
It's always pretty depressing to go back and watch this or old Colbert Report episodes and realize how parts are incredibly "evergreen", sometimes you don't even need to change out the names.
I'm not going to defend Silver's predictions, but what was really refreshing about his work was some lovely diagrams, and real intent behind exposing his methodology. it was never 'trust me I'm the expert', but 'wow, this is hard and these are the problems and this is how I tried to deal with them'