An active-duty major writes Tom Ricks (via) and notes just how wrong McCain and others were about DADT:
At what point in time should journalists, bloggers, etc … hold those who made wildly inaccurate predications on the lifting of the ban accountable? All the retired generals and officers (LTG Mixon, Merrill A. McPeak and Col. Dave Bedey for example) who predicted that soldiers would leave the military by the thousands, or John McCain and other politicians describing how it would affect us as a fighting force? At some point I feel that the public should be reminded of their predictions so the next time they make predictions that are way off the mark, fewer people will give them credence.
People do call out McCain and others all the time, but it’s in specific blog posts or articles. There’s no central repository of the ridiculous predictions that he and others have made about DADT and a host of other issues, so lazy journalists with no memory have to do some work to point out that McCain and others have been consistently wrong throughout their careers.
Perhaps Media Matters or a similar group could start an accountability wiki that focuses on the wrongness of establishment types. Take the top 20 guests from Sunday morning shows over the past ten years, pick a dozen or so issues, and tell us how many they got right. I’m sure that project would get some traction, and maybe even some of the establishment media would start using it.
MattF
Googling “McCain invade russia”:
youtube.com/watch?v=gq6_Shrq0nc
Waingro
This is a fantastic idea, though I’m concerned that the sheer number of Bill Kristol’s entries would probably break the internet.
c u n d gulag
Holding pundits and politicians accountable?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
They’re all too busy licking and slobbering on each other at their ‘Mutual Admiration Society’ meetings.
amk
sunday talk shows would die without that old angry, bitter and clueless man and his sidekicks. The mofos don’t have anything better to do on every fucking sunday ?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Do you think WordPress could handle the load if you added it here?
amk
@Waingro: what about the mustachioed motherfucker ?
Special Patrol Group
What about all the wingnuts (e.g., WSJ) who said that if Clinton raised taxes in 1993 via the Deficit Reduction Act, that the economy would collapse? They ever apologize?
How about everyone (e.g., McCain) who endorsed the Iraq Invasion?
How about when Dutch Reagan cut an LP that said Medicare would lead to Communism and doctors not being able to live where they wanted?
How about when corporate douchebags said that child labor laws and meat inspection laws would cripple their industries?
Civil Rights (e.g., Why the South Must Prevail)? Women’s rights?
The McCains (and his ilk) of every generation have been loud wrong about some big issues. Were they ever held accountable?
dr. bloor
The only thing more aggravating than having to do the press corps job for them is knowing that they most assuredly would not use it. Can’t put the access and cocktail weenies at risk, dontcha know.
Special Patrol Group
Shit, anyone who got the Iraq Invasion dead wrong is still considered a Very Serious Person on National Defense and Foreign Policy on the Sabbath Gasbag Shows (e.g., McCain). Someone who got Iraq absolutely correct every step of the way (e.g., Howard Dean) has zero credibility on those issues with Dancin’ Dave et al. Fuckers.
Ash Can
The one thing that might — might — get at least some news jockeys to use a repository like this is that it’s a one-stop-shopping concept that appeals to their laziness. I’d like to see someone give it a shot, at least.
WereBear
It would be an awesome tool to post on Facebook and send to “those relatives.”
cleek
the media does not do this kind of judgement-passing. they:
1. rely on partisan sources to make noise.
2. wait for mainstream talk shows to pick up on it.
3. if enough of 2 do, they’ll do a he-said/she-said article.
mistermix
@dr. bloor: You have a point. I still think that an easy-to-use and well-documented site would be used by a lot of second-tier journalists, many of whom are mainly busy and/or lazy.
amk
U.S. Unemployment Down Sharply in Early October
Not seasonally adjusted, unemployment falls from 8.7% at the end of Sept. to 8.3% in mid-Oct.
schrodinger's cat
Can anyone explain to me why was McCain the darling of the press in the 2000 election
WereBear
@schrodinger’s cat: BBQ! Tire swings! Posterior kissing!
Jim Pharo
I’ve been pushing this for years — good luck. I”d call it the “Accountability Project” (a name the DNC was “using” for a week or two a few years back).
I have long thought it mattered that the other side was almost always wrong about everything, yet no one ever mentioned it
CaptainFwiffo
You’d need a complex scoring system, because you have different kinds, levels and degrees of wrongness. For example, one person could say the Earth is flat, the other could say the Earth is a sphere. Both are wrong, but one is “completely wrong”, the other is “slightly off”. If you judge them to be equally wrong, then you’re “wronger than wrong”. And if you make a statement that is so out there that you can’t even determine its wrongness, then you’re “not even wrong”, which is the wrongest kind of wrong yet discovered.
cleek
@schrodinger’s cat:
McCain spent years ingratiating himself to the press – always available for an interview, or to take up a seat on a talk show, always happy to trash the GOP (because he hated Bush) and the Dems. and the press returned the favor by selling him to the public as an honorable, honest, no-BS maverick.
LosGatosCA
This can’t even be done for the ESPN sports pundits, who predict the rise of the Cowboys with greater regularity than McCain appears on a Sunday talk show.
Trakker
Today’s voters don’t want to hear facts, they want politicians to affirm their prejudices. Republicans do that best, therefore they keep winning.
misterpuff
I’m sure even pundits on the left are wrong, but they never put our ideas into action, so how will we ever know?
Misterpuff
I’m sure that even pundits on the left are sometimes wrong, but since they never try anything we suggest, how will we ever know?
handsmile
Related to and demonstrating the potential value of such an “accountability wiki” is the report released in May by a Hamilton College political science/public policy class that analyzed the predictions of 26 prominent op-ed columnists and TV pundits from September 2007-December 2008.
Their findings were released in a research paper, “Are Talking Heads Blowing Hot Air? An Analysis of the Accuracy of Forecasts in the Political Media.”
In what should be a surprise to absolutely no one, Paul Krugman was found to be the top prognosticator. Following Krugman, the most accurate pundits were Maureen Dowd (!), former PA governor Ed Rendell, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi.
Scoring lowest in the accuracy of his predictions was conservative columnist Cal Thomas. Deemed “The Ugly,” the other lowest scorers were Senators Lindsey Graham, Carl Levin, and Joe Lieberman; Sam Donaldson and George Will.
ImplicIt in the findings of this report would seem to be confirmation of the maxim that facts have a well-known liberal bias.
This link to Poynter.org/Jim Romenesko provides more details of the Hamilton College study, including a link to the report itself:
poynter.org/latest-news/romenesko/130485/claim-krugman-is-top-prognosticator-cal-thomas-is-the-worst…
amk
teh obama loving fucking librul media.
pewresearch.org/pubs/2116/media-primary-news-coverage-blogs-republican-presidential-race-barack-obam…
He comes first by being the last.
jrg
Lulz. “Party of Personal Responsibility”. Wheee!
geg6
And much hilarity would ensue.
Which is why it will never happen or, if it does, not a single entity among the establishment media will ever give it the light of day.
kdaug
It requires us forgetting
schrodinger's cat
@jrg: Yes I remember that the press was much more deferential to Dubya, they only started calling him out after Katrina. I don’t remember how things were for Clinton, before Lewinski, since I did not pay much attention to politics back then.
schrodinger's cat
I also find the MSM embrace of Cheney quite disturbing. I wonder how many people really take their cues from media coverage, I mean exactly how influential are they. I have lost all faith in our MSM since Bush years before that I did take them seriously.
cat48
Wow, Pew says Gingrich’s media coverage (15% Pos)was 6% more positive than Obama’s 9% Positive coverage. Ouch. Looks like I wasn’t imagining things. The media hates the prez!
Bill H.
All nations which have permitted open service by gays have found it to be a “nonevent,” but given that it was implemented only four weeks ago and that separation from the military can take up to six months to accomplish, it is far too early to be crowing about McCain being “proved wrong” yet. Yes, he is wrong, and yes, the evidence of the first month is that it is turning out to be the “nonevent” that other nations have experienced.
Evan Klondar
For what it’s worth, Balloon Juice covered my senior thesis a few months back which addressed just this question. Turns out that most pundit’s predictions are totally awful.
It’d be great if someone addressed it over a longer time-frame, but if you’re going to do that, I warn you–it is extremely labor-intensive.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Bill H.: So you are saying that there maybe be a huge uptick in ETSing?
burnspbesq
Simplifying assumptions are often useful in making complex systems more easily understood.
Assume that Republicans are always wrong and always lying, until proven otherwise. You will be right far more often than you are wrong.
It is, however, important to remember that assumptions must give way in the face of evidence to the contrary.
The Moar You Know
Nope, it’s really not. While the policy has been “in place” for only about a month, the preparation for the policy has been going on for a couple of years. You could say that the date that the policy was announced as being implemented is actually the date that the policy was finished being implemented.
It’s over. Nothing left for the codgers to do but die off so we can get on with the business of building civilization.
Robert Waldmann
There was the study of pundits’ predictions. Unsurprisingly Krugman did the best by a wide margin. Also George Will under-performed a flip coin.
hamilton.edu/news/polls/pundit
Yes it should be done for politicians too. Of course who will find the resources. You will note that I link to the work of 5 undergraduates (when they grow up they will learn that forecasting accuracy doesn’t matter)
Robert Waldmann
more at dailykos
bit.ly/iRGkJs
mark
“there is no central repository of the ridiculous predictions”
Now, there is an idea!
Why don’t we start one? kinda like politifact or something.
I’ve been trying to get GOS or Digby to do something like this. We could arrange so eventually some liars like Kristol could reach a “0 credibility” factor and be ignored and a network laughed at everytime the had them on/quoted them.
Long overdue!
jonas
Some intrepid government students at Hamilton College in New York recently asked this question: how accurate are cable news pundits? The results: might as well flip a coin in most cases. There were two outliers, however. The worst prognosticator on TV was Cal Thomas, a B-list wingnut columnist who is wrong about everything all the time, yet still has a job for some reason.
The best? His Shrillness, Paul Krugman.
sukabi
for that idea to actually work, you first have to do the same with the ‘journalists’ to weed out the ones that are JINOs and are being compensated for spinning rather than informing.
Once you get the ‘storytellers’ cleared away, then you might actually have a functional, informative journalistic environment.
handsmile
@Robert Waldmann:
See comment #24 above. More reading, less typing.
EDIT: Not you alone, I see (Jonas #40)
jonas
@jonas: D’oh! Just saw several comments above that pointed this out as well. Sorry.
BARRASSO
Conservatives are basically in the same position as the guys in the 18th century who said all the inventions have been invented. ‘Social progress has gone far enough and all that horseshit, I have my freedom FU.’ We don’t need any more freedom cause I have mine.
BARRASSO
We shold just start a wiki, call it wrongopedia and add info as we have free time.
An Idiot
>At what point in time should journalists, bloggers, etc … hold those who made wildly inaccurate predications on the lifting of the ban accountable?
At all of them. All the points in time.
We desperately need some sort of central repository of failed predictions, and we need to be constantly making more and more noise about it until it becomes impossible to ignore. Any cultists that think the world is going to end in
2012their lifetime also ought to be shamed in this fashion, especially since you know that when 2012 actually comes, they’re just going to push back the end of the world to 2018 or something, like such cultists always do. Because God, in his infinite benevolence and omniscience, must have just told them the wrong date by accident.Emdee
Is there a risk to this strategy of right-wingers trying to blame the downturn on the increase in minimum wage laws?
You know it would get traction, despite obvious and painful stupidity.
chrome agnomen
the flip side of all this is that the DFHs have been on the correct side of most predictions since the 60s. and even when the outcome didn’t match their positions, we were still most always correct morally and ethically.
Nutella
One thing this would need is some dramatic rating images like ‘Pants on Fire’ to indicate extreme wrongness and/or stupidity. The good, the bad, and the ugly was a decent attempt but we need better category names.