From Storm Sandy to the election, speculation dominates the US media

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/nov/04/storm-sandy-us-elections-speculation

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America experienced a moment last week when forecast became fact; shockingly, concretely. Tomorrow, the same thing will happen. A speculative river will solidify into a hard fact. Whether it is the trajectory of the "super storm" Sandy, or the outcome of the presidential election, recent US media discourse has been dominated by forecasts, forecasting and those who make and disseminate them.

Informed judgment, or speculation as it is less flatteringly known, has formed a key component of reporting for as long as the practice itself. The faulty forecast has become the dry rot in the flimsy framework of public trust in journalism. Failures to adequately anticipate phenomena, from al-Qaida's rise to the financial system's collapse, have contributed to an erosion of credibility. The "bendy tree" journalism of wind-blown TV news reporters has too often misled audiences about the threat of weather systems; the charts say one thing, the man in the Berghaus clinging to a lamppost another.

As with every other branch of journalism, the dynamics of reporting "what will happen" are shifting from the qualitative model of expert opinion to the quantitative model of what can be extrapolated from measurement. One of the astonishing aspects of Sandy was how accurate the forecasts often were; foreseeing, for example, its move offshore before landing, as predicted, smack in the middle of New Jersey's shoreline.

Thorough reporting soon followed, as a torrent of social media updates and photos tumbled into the stream of innovative efforts by big media. The rapid, sketchy information, false rumours and photos made some kind of sense of the scattered chaos. We watched, with timelines, maps and commentary, journalism get better before our very eyes.

In a real storm, it seems the media can pull together, and make use of the streams and technologies which arrived to disrupt it. In US political forecasting, however, punditry has created its own fake storm, centring on the predictive powers of one man, Nate Silver. Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog makes his voice one of the most listened-to in US politics. But Silver didn't develop his journalism through the traditional Harvard Crimson and Washington Post route, wearing out shoe leather on the campaign trail and drinking in Capitol Hill bars with interns and advisers. He has a background in economics and started his career modelling baseball statistics. His prediction modelling for the 2008 election gave him remarkable accuracy and elevated his blog to a sought-after source of political wisdom. A deal with the New York Times sealed his rise.

His prominence has unsettled those he disrupts, and the possibility that he might be wrong encouraged the sceptics into open hostility. In his new book The Signal and the Noise, Silver lays bare how political pundits failed to predict accurately the scale of the Obama victory. Joe Scarborough, a commentator for MSNBC, and a former Republican congressman, levelled his guns at Silver last week, saying that he was an "ideologue", a far more insulting term in US journalism than in British, and that the election was in effect a "coin toss".

At its most basic level, this argument goes beyond left and right – it is about a new emerging school of journalism challenging the status quo. Journalism delivered through lovely prose and burnished anecdote, developed through access traded, sometimes for truth, is under threat from spreadsheets and the numeracy of a different elite. All journalism in one way or another is about the performance of information; presenting, polishing, contextualising and reporting. Silver's performance is through numbers and methodology; those left outside it attack it, without acknowledging this might be a world where both can thrive.

As of Friday Silver had Obama at an 81% likelihood of winning the election. The polls themselves, it seems, were disrupted by the politics of Sandy. And this was something no one predicted.