Media trumped

Mistaking political trends points to confirmation bias

Hillary Clinton’s campaign managers should not be the only ones doing some dismayed introspection after her rout — the liberal press and its attendant pollsters, too, urgently need to explain why their predictions of an easy win for Ms Clinton fell so wide of the mark. And that includes the pundit of pundits, Nate Silver, who gave Ms Clinton a 71 per cent chance of winning with 302 electoral votes. At the other end of the prediction spectrum is Helmut Norpoth, a professor at Stony Brook University with a model that has correctly called six previous elections, who predicted a win for Mr Trump as far back as February — a call he stood by right up to election day. Mr Silver’s prediction was given wide coverage in the liberal media from the East and West Coasts but Mr Norpoth’s predictions, which essentially said the voting would be so close that Mr Trump could well top out, found traction only in outlets such as Breitbart and Fox, the unapologetic voices of the alt-right. Both sets of media were acting as echo chambers of the readership to which they cater. But where Fox and its ilk are and always have been considered too biased to be credible, the liberal media needs to face the hard truth that it, too, lacks credibility. Supporting Ms Clinton is acceptable for the editorial pages. But good or bad, editors owe it to their readers to deliver the most accurate assessments from the ground rather than mould stories to fit the political proclivities of their owners or the prevailing editorial line.

The problem of confirmation bias, or the tendency to interpret new evidence to confirm existing opinions, is not limited to the American press, which is about as polarised as that country’s electorate. And being in the world’s powerful country means that it can manifest itself in dangerous ways, as it did when even the most blue-blooded of media houses swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the canard manufactured by the George W Bush White House that Saddam Hussein had vast stocks of weapons of mass destruction. Not that the US press is the sole offender on this score: In the 2015 general elections in the UK, the media confidently backed poll predictions of a Labour victory instead of the Conservative sweep; likewise for a Brexit “shocker”. The Indian media has its own recent embarrassments to contend with — the hugely wrong call on the Aam Aadmi Party’s sweep of the Delhi Assembly elections in 2015 and on the Nitish-Lalu victory in Bihar just months later (in which several experts surpassed themselves by assuming a Bharatiya Janata Party victory on the basis of leads). 

If there is a critical lesson for the Indian media from the debacle of the US presidential election, it is the urgent need for genuine impartiality and honest reporting rather than retrofitting facts into preconceived notions that serve a particular political or business agenda. It is, in fact, no surprise that even before he has assumed charge Mr Trump has unconsciously emulated Narendra Modi’s strategy of keeping the press at a distance — no reporters were allowed to accompany him on his flight from New York to Washington and he has suggested that he may drop the traditional press corps on official trips too. In itself, the end of government junkets is actually welcome. But warts and all, the press remains one of the most crucial components of the checks and balances in a democracy. The tradition of a healthy relationship between the government and the press must continue.