Nate Silver, prominent New York Times statistician who is currently launching a new website with ESPN, on Friday again criticized Politico for its overreliance on horse race coverage.
“Recently for example, I saw an article in Politico that claimed the government shutdown was responsible for the Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s expanding lead in the Virginia gubernatorial race,” Silver said at an Online News Association conference. “The article cited one question in the poll that the government wasn’t popular and another showing McAuliffe well ahead, and asserted there was a link between the two. There was no evidence however, of a causal link that anyone had switched their vote because of the shutdown.”
Silver said that the way in which the information was presented in the article, not the information itself, was the issue.
“It was a fine theory, but instead it was stated as a fact when there was no proof of it whatsoever,” he added.
