Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight and the dangers of being ideologically neutral

By claiming the mantle of pure analysis, Silver is falling into a familiar journalistic trap

FiveThirtyEight
(Image credit: (Illustration by Lauren Hansen | Images courtesy FiveThirtyEight))

Nate Silver's new venture, FiveThirtyEight, is now live, and the reviews are starting to come in. To summarize: it's terrible. Reviewers from Paul Krugman to Tyler Cowen — who seldom agree on much — have panned the launch. If you need to be personally convinced, just check out this example. Yikes.

What went wrong? One major problem has to do with ideology. In an attempt to focus solely on objective analysis, Silver is ignoring one of the hardest-won journalistic lessons of the last decade — there is no such thing as ideology-free journalism.

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Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.