Nate Silver: 2/3 of America's op-ed columnists are "worthless"

He hates punditry, he hates narratives, he hates bold proclamations — and so too does he hate the media’s most willing vessels for all three.

If he wasn't a gay, Jewish nerd, I might be in love.

 

His book "The Signal and the Noise" is destined to go down as a classic.

And he doesn't reject non-empirical means of analysis. For example, he has a chapter where he readily admits that baseball scouts outperformed him in rating prospects.

 

How big of him.

I like Silver's work as far it goes. And I'll read the site, too. I just found the dig of op-ed columnists ironic.

 

Is he referring to methodology, or the fact any reader knows what most op-ed writers have written just by looking at the headline? It's predictability that makes it the weakest section of most papers.

 

Thought provoking observation MG. When you think to the op ed columnists at Silver's former home they
are all very predictable. See Rhoden, William

 

Sounds like a direct shot at Dowd and Noonan to me.

 

From what Silver has written in the past, I believe he thinks that many columnist abandon nuance for bold opinions, and rewarded whether or not those bold opinions are sufficiently defended.

 

Boom, to me there's a difference between having a known point of view and being completely predictable in every way. Krugman, Brooks and Douthat have recognizable ideological slants, but they also at least TRY to say things in new ways and wrestle with new ideas using their points of view. Most op-ed writers don't even bother to do that. They just preach to a choir that's increasingly invisible. If I owned a newspaper, I'd ashcan the op-ed page and print more letters, or even, gasp!, real news.

 

Brooks is a self-righteous buffoon.

 

I'd bet that, if you gave me a news headline, I could more often than not tell you word-for-word what E.J. Dionne will have to say about it. That's not a good thing.

 

Same with Rhoden. We're only weeks away from a column proclaiming
Ray Rice misunderstood and a victim racial bias.

 

The problem is structural. Op-ed pages are now run with the idea Columnist X isn't a person thinking about issues, he's a person expressing a particular ideological point of view on said issues. A duller format could not be imagined. BTW, if I ran a paper, I'd ashcan the editorials, too.