R i g h t a r d i a: Liberal pundits are more likely than conservatives to predict correctly

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Liberal pundits are more likely than conservatives to predict correctly

Students at Hamilton College under the public policy professor P. Gary Wyckoff have subjected 26 of your favorite pundits to rigorous content analysis.

Their research paper, titled "Are Talking Heads Blowing Hot Air," the Hamilton College students "sampled the predictions of 26 individuals who wrote columns in major newspapers and/or appeared on the three major Sunday television news shows (Face the Nation, Meet the Press, and This Week) over a 16 month period from September 2007 to December 2008."

They used a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being “will not happen," 5 being “will absolutely happen”) to rate each prediction the pundits made, and then they evaluated each prediction for whether or not it came true.

Here is what they found:

THE GOOD: Paul Krugman, New York Times (highest scorer); Maureen Dowd, New York Times; Ed Rendell, former Pennsylvania Governor; Chuck Schumer, New York Senator; Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader; Kathleen Parker, Washington Post and TownHall.com; David Brooks, New York Times; Eugene Robinson, Washington Post; Hank Paulson, former Secretary of the Treasury

THE BAD: Howard Wolfson, counselor to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg; Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas Governor/Fox News host; Newt Gingrich, eternal Presidential candidate; John Kerry, Massachusetts Senator; Bob Herbert, New York Times; Andrea Mitchell, MSNBC; Thomas Friedman, New York Times, David Broder, Washington Post (deceased); Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune; Nicholas Kristof, New York Times; Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State

THE UGLY: George Will, Washington Post/This Week; Sam Donaldson, ABC News; Joe Lieberman, Connecticut Senator; Carl Levin, Michigan Senator; Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Senator; Cal Thomas, Chicago Tribune (lowest scorer);

The students discovered that a few factors impacted a prediction's accuracy. The first is whether or not the prediction is a conditional; conditional predictions were more likely to not come true.

The second was partisanship; liberals were more likely than conservatives to predict correctly. The final significant factor in a prediction's outcome was having a law degree; lawyers predicted incorrectly more often.

It is not surprising that liberal pundits are more accurate than conservatives.

Many conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh are under-educated and never developed the rigorous analytical thought process that is essential in college. Many conservatives take an overly sentimental, simplistic and emotional view of politics.

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/03/study-pundits-wrong-most-_n_856886.html