July 22, 2013

The NYT public editor: "I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture..."

"... and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive."
Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie “Moneyball” disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.
His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.”
That's a lot more than awareness to not fitting in. It's hard to fit in with people you are attacking.