The Media’s Prediction Addiction Is Anti-Democratic
Poll-Obsessed Journalists Try to Pick Winners Before the People Do
You have to give them credit: many journalists are confessing that they really blew it in the first act of this presidential election season. But most of their mea culpas are off point, apologies for the wrong mistake.
The media is collectively beating itself up for a series of poor predictions—dismissing the Trump candidacy, calling for an early Clinton coronation, anticipating a contested GOP convention—instead of beating itself up for a deeper pathology: its compulsive haste to predict everything in the first place.
Serious people, and even professors of journalism, …
