Hillary Clinton Gave Nate Silver A 71.4% Chance He'd Keep His Job. Ouch!
He never saw it coming!
Nate Silver — that guy who was right once and then consistently wrong ever since — is yet another contentious media figure to fall this week. Looks like the "rule of threes" applies to career deaths, as well. The Hollywood Reporter announced Tuesday that Silver is out at ABC News as a result of ongoing layoffs at Disney.
However, Silver’s site FiveThirtyEight will move on without him, but wait isn't Silver FiveThirtyEight? No, see, Silver might've created the FiveThirtyEight blog, but it was acquired by ESPN in 2013 and transferred five years later to ABC, which is majority-owned by the Walt Disney Company. That's a very corporate Russian nesting doll way of saying, "Never sell your shit!"
When Silver sold the FiveThirtyEight name and web domain to ESPN as part of the deal to have him join the company, here's what President John Skipper had to say:
“Our goal here is to make Nate comfortable and happy that this is his new long-term home, so he doesn’t have to do this every four years," said the Skipster. “We really care about smart, talented individuals who can make a difference, and we think that’s what Nate can do for us.”
ABC News says it will keep the FiveThirtyEight brand but “streamline the site and make it more efficient.”
“ABC News remains dedicated to data journalism with a core focus on politics, the economy and enterprise reporting — this streamlined structure will allow us to be more closely aligned with our priorities for the 2024 election and beyond,” an ABC News spokesperson said in a statement. “We are grateful for the invaluable contributions of the team members who will be departing the organization and know they will continue to make an important impact on the future of journalism.”
Let’s hope that rambling statement isn’t an example of the new “more efficient” FiveThirtyEight. That was a lot of words to say “we’re bleeding money and many of you are losing your jobs.” By the end of Tuesday, it seemed as if the entire senior management team at FiveThirtyEight had lost their jobs.
Upon hearing the news, political strategist Rachel Bitecofer tweeted, "We get to keep 538 but lose Nate?! This is the best week EVER."
Later, podcaster and badass Rachel Vindman took a moment to Hammer dance on Silver's professional grave.
“Missed opportunity. They should have let him go because he's a pompous and insufferable asshole.”
— Rachel Vindman 🌻 (@Rachel Vindman 🌻) 1682455237
"Missed opportunity," she tweeted. "They should have let him go because he's a pompous and insufferable asshole."
Damn. You'd think they'd fired the New York Times needle.
So, let's take a moment to reflect on how Silver developed this bizarre alternative brand as contrarian pundit who people don't seem to like that much.
The first sign of trouble was probably the 2016 Republican primary when he absolutely refused to accept that the candidate consistently ahead in all the polls might actually win the nomination. He dismissed this possibility out of hand and declared that the “party decides.” This position failed as basic political commentary because the Republican Party proved morally weak and spineless. Donald Trump seized control of a party that couldn’t decide on the sides for a fast-food combo meal.
However, Silver had positioned himself and the good folks at FiveThirtyEight as data gurus. Silver’s book Signal and the Noise was all about building mathematical models based on probability and statistics. There was real time polling data that Silver flat-out ignored, perhaps because he personally couldn’t accept that Republicans would nominate an unhinged psychopath like Donald Trump. But that bias didn’t reflect realistic probabilities. I think this was a serious blind spot for many educated white liberals and moderates who wanted to believe a qualified woman winning the presidency was more probable than a boorish, white male jackass, as if the latter doesn't describe at least half of our former presidents.
Sure, I wish I lived in the alternate reality Silver presented where Hillary Clinton won Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida, but wishes ain't data.
Silver also alienated people with his weird Twitter rants, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In September 2021, when the Delta variant had disrupted our fall plans (you remember the memes), Silver suggested that the media and medical experts were deliberately freaking people out about breakthrough cases.
"If two-thirds of vaccinated infectious disease experts won't eat indoors at a restaurant, and almost half won't attend an outdoor sporting event," Silver tweeted, "then of course people reading that are going to think breakthroughs are a big deal and of course they'll want boosters."
Just this February, responding to a Wall Street Journal article, Silver tweeted, “Welp. The behavior of a certain cadre of scientists who used every trick in the book to suppress discussion of this issue is something I'll never forget. A huge disservice to science and public health. They should be profoundly embarrassed."
Silver insisted that he wasn’t saying there was a lab leak, but he believed it was a horrible mistake to treat the very topic as a “conspiracy theory." This led to an exchange of words with MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan, who pointed out that the lab leak originally began as an unfounded, xenophobic conspiracy.
"The simple reason why so many people weren’t keen to discuss the ‘lab leak’ *theory* is because it was originally conflated by the right with ‘Chinese bio weapon’ conspiracies and continues to be conflated by the right with anti-Fauci conspiracies. Blame the conspiracy theorists.
"It’s hard to have a good faith disagreement about a major issue if the issue itself has been hijacked by bad faith folks."
Silver clapped back, "This is so refreshingly honest." (He's being sarcastic.) "The Bad People thought the lab leak might be true, therefore as journalists we couldn't be expected to actually evaluate the evidence for it."
He went on:
"The reason this drives me up the wall is that if you're ever going to pretend that 'misinformation' is a useful category, at least acknowledge it was a massive error to label lab leak discussion as ‘misinformation’ when multiple US government agencies now put the chances ≥50%,"
Yeah, that certainly supports the thesis in Rachel Vindman's tweet above. It’s not a shock that ABC wouldn’t want to pay for Silver's commentary or have the brand it owns associated with him. Guess that is efficient.
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Next thing you knew, Nate was a regular paid contributor on Faux News, bashing how mean & out of touch the left is, just like Smegma & Gabbard
They could get rid of Chris fucking Christie and nothing of value would be lost.