Analytical Skills Can't Save You From Silly News Cycles
On the over-parsing of trivial moments that don't deserve it
Let me say up front that I genuinely really like the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast (though its recent incarnation can’t match the loopy energy of the classic Nate Silver/ Micah Cohen/ Clare Malone line-up ). They come at politics from an angle that I generally find very congenial, and at their best they do a really good job of putting the topics of the moment in context in a quantitative and wonky way that I find very… calming, I guess, for lack of a better word.
That said, there are limits to their approach, which were shown up pretty clearly by this week’s episode, particularly the first segment:
(If you don’t want the video version, here’s a link to just the audio, but I kind of like putting faces to familiar voices…)
The first segment is devoted entirely to analyzing Joe Biden’s brief dismissive response to a question about how he plans to recover from his current poor standing in the polls. Which, by the way, is a grand total of five words: “I don’t believe the polls.” This is dubbed a “bad use of polling,” in a play on one of their recurring bits, and they spend well over ten minutes talking about how this contributes to the general climate of distrust in the media and other institutions. There’s a lot of effort to put this in the context of Trump’s frequent attacks on the media, and argue that Biden’s done a bad thing here.
Of course, five words seems an awfully thin reed on which to hang twelve minutes of podcast, which made me wonder about the more immediate context of the question— had they edited down a longer answer? If you pull up the transcript from the White House, you can see that they did, but not in the way I first thought— the response is just those five words, but that’s actually the second question from the reporter, Francesca Chambers from McClatchy, who tacked it on after receiving a longer, thoughtful answer to her first question, which was about the pandemic.
And, you know, that’s kind of important context, because that’s exactly the sort of press-conference behavior that routinely leads to brief, blow-off answers. Biden’s five-word answer is not a considered statement disparaging polls and polling, it’s relatively polite standard Washingtonese for “You’re done now, sit down.” Had Chambers asked this as her first question, or had some other reporter asked an equivalent question, Biden probably would’ve given a longer answer, quite possibly along the lines of the better answers that the 538 crew sketch out in their discussion. But giving a good answer to a tacked-on second question would’ve been rewarding a breach of press-conference etiquette, so it got a blow-off answer. There’s really no need to analyze it past that.
You’ve got something similar going on with Biden’s hot-mic moment with Peter Doocy of Fox, who shouted out a question about inflation as the press were being shooed out of the room. Again, this is behavior that doesn’t deserve more than a blow-off answer, so Biden’s sarcastic “It’s a great asset — more inflation. What a stupid sonofabitch” is about the right response. But otherwise very sensible people like Josh Barro devoted an inordinate amount of energy both in newsletters (tacked on at the end) and especially on Twitter to analyzing the significance of this brief exchange, and how Biden could’ve done better.
These are both examples of the kind of thing that makes me wax grouchy about “critical thinking” in public discourse: they’re bringing elaborate analysis to bear on moments that really don’t deserve it. On a surface level, these seem to be doing the thing that’s the hallmark of smart analysis—taking a comment and putting it into a broader context, then criticizing it on that basis— but they’re doing it in a way that renders the whole exercise dumb. The broad context of Trumpism and anti-establishment sentiment and all the rest is much less relevant than the immediate context of where and how these questions were asked.
This kind of thing goes on all the time, with people pulling video clips or short snippets of text out of the immediate human context that’s genuinely essential for understanding their meaning, and putting them in some broader society-wide context that is vastly less important, but seems Significant to the galaxy-brained. Something that in its actual context is clearly either flippant or fairly anodyne gets yanked out and subjected to a degree of exegesis that would give Biblical scholars pause, until it ends up seeming like it has deep meaning.
The ultimate cause of this is a kind of academicization of everything that I keep almost writing about, but not having the energy for. The proximate cause of these specific examples is another common problem, namely that there’s just not very much actual news, particularly not news that’s happening in a way that demands or rewards the kinds of analysis being done here.
That might seem like a weird claim— we’re neck deep in Big Stories, with the pandemic and the standoff in Ukraine and the economy and whatever the hell they’re doing in Congress. But none of these stories are generating actual news in the sense of new facts that urgently need to be uncovered and understood right now. These are all long-time-scale stories being oversampled to feed a 24-hour news cycle. Congress needs weeks to months to do anything, as do the pandemic and the economy, and the Ukraine situation is a standoff— when something happens, a lot of stuff will happen very fast, but until then, it’s tense but dull. These stories are all still happening, but they’re all in holding patterns where we’re already doing the things that can be done, and it will be a while yet before we see any meaningful changes.
But, of course, we’ve got round-the-clock shows on cable and maniacs on Twitter who need something to talk about, and podcasts that need to fill time. So we end up with smart people analyzing insignificant fluctuations in a way that just generates nonsense. There’s nothing in Biden’s remark that in any way demands the analytical skills that the 538 crew bring to the table, but they’ve got to do something, so you end up with ten minutes of trivial punditry.
(To be fair, the other two segments of the 538 pod are much better, because they’re dealing with stories that benefit from some quantitative analysis of questions like “How often do ‘amateur’ candidates win, and what are the recent trends?” and “What’s the benefit of ‘going rogue’ for politicians?” It’s just that first segment that was infuriating, because it’s nothing you couldn’t get from some replacement-level pundit panel, and I expect better from them.)
We’d honestly all be better off if we could step back and realize that a lot of the time, the news isn’t really new and urgent, and just let it lie. Rather than parsing trivial incidents like they’re some powerful but opaque bit of poetry, we should step away and go skiing, or read a new book, or do housework, or damn near anything else.
If you like the above, you should buy my book; it’s not actually much like the above at all, but selling a few more copies would make me and my publisher very happy. Alternatively, you could click one or both of these buttons:
And if you want to talk at me about how Biden’s passing comments really truly are Important News, you can do that in the comments. I’m going skiing.