Category: media

Washington, it is said, is Hollywood for ugly people. (Those who watch Netflix’s “House of Cards” may have noted the lack of really handsome actors.) And on the vertical spectrum of coolness journalists are on the bottom,

And with that context (we’ll get to “wrongheaded” presently), James Freeman reports on Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which was missing a prominent guest, Donald Trump:

At a black-tie dinner on Saturday night, Beltway media folk celebrated their adversarial relationship with President Donald Trump. The night was ostensibly a celebration of an independent press and the First Amendment. But event speakers gave the impression that America’s independent press has actually chosen a side.

Writing in the Washington Post, Monica Hesse sets the scene:

The White House Correspondents’ Association punched back this weekend against an administration that has denigrated it, attempted to discredit it and, ultimately, snubbed it by becoming the first administration in decades to skip out on the annual bread-breaking between the White House and the reporters who cover the presidency.

“We cannot ignore the rhetoric that has been employed by the president about who we are and what we do,” association president Jeff Mason told a ballroom of journalists attending the correspondents’ dinner on Saturday night. “We are not fake news. We are not failing news organizations. And we are not the enemy of the American people.”

But sometimes fake news is in the last place you look, and the Post thought perhaps it had discovered some at the very event dedicated to denying its existence among the mainstream press. Ms. Hesse’s Washington Post colleague Emily Heil reports on the evening’s speech delivered by “Daily Show” fake news reporter Hasan Minhaj:

Minhaj implied his hosts told him not to roast Trump. “I was explicitly told not to go after the administration,” he said after launching his first jab at the president, looking over at White House Correspondents’ Association president Jeff Mason with a look of exaggerated apology. (An item in Saturday’s New York Post hinted at a similar embargo, citing “a source who saw the comic” at a Manhattan gig, claiming organizers had declared POTUS off-limits, “because Trump is so thin-skinned.”)

Mason disputes that — and even tried fact-checking the comedian during his act. “You were not told that,” Mason can be heard saying, with a wry smile, as Minhaj claimed he’d been gagged.

Mason told us on Sunday that he was confused by the bit, since he “absolutely” never instructed Minhaj to steer clear of Trump. The two did talk about the theme of the evening, he said, which was to honor the work of the White House press corp and the importance of the first amendment. “I had said all along that I wasn’t looking for someone to roast the president in absentia,” Mason says.

That last comment could perhaps be construed as a request not to attack the President, so maybe fake news is sometimes in the eye of the consumer. In any case, Mr. Minhaj didn’t appear to be pulling any punches. Dave Itzkoff writes in the New York Times about the comedian’s tough love for the assembled media:

“We’re living in this strange time where trust is more important than truth,” Mr. Minhaj said in his performance at the Washington Hilton Hotel. “And supporters of President Trump trust him. And I know journalists, you guys are definitely trying to do good work. I just think that a lot of people don’t trust you right now. And can you blame them?”

A lot of people might have become even less inclined to trust the media upon hearing members of the crowd laughing at Mr. Minhaj’s comments about certain Trump administration officials—though Michael Grynbaum of the New York Times correctly notes that not everyone was laughing:

Wary of looking biased, many prominent journalists in the ballroom kept a poker face during Mr. Minhaj’s nastier punch lines. (He called Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, a “Nazi” and labeled the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, a racist, moments quickly featured on Breitbart News and other right-wing news websites.)

So were the prominent journalists simply wary of “looking biased,” or did they sincerely believe the attacks were unfair? Mr. Grynbaum’s reporting suggests it was the former:

… as reporters fanned out to after-parties, they described the night as a needed tonic to the celebrity-soaked atmosphere of recent correspondents’ dinners and the national climate of hostility toward the news media.

Blake Hounshell, the editor of Politico Magazine, wrote on Twitter, “The WHCD may have lost some glitz tonight, but recovered its self-respect.”

Over at the Washington Post, Ms. Heil says that the Minhaj performance “generally got a collective thumbs-up.” She adds:

Following the dinner, the comic got a warm welcome at the swanky NBC/MSNBC after-party. There were “tons of compliments” for the Comedy Central funnyman, says one partyer who spied the Minhaj looking relieved and relaxed as he mingled and chatted in a corner with MSNBC President Phil Griffin.

Perhaps there’s a hosting gig at MSNBC in Mr. Minhaj’s future, as he joked during his performance. And as for the correspondents who hosted Saturday’s event, the headline in Mr. Grynbaum’s story sums it up: “For Journalists, Annual Dinner Serves Up Catharsis and Resolve.” Having seen what they were serving up, Mr. Trump would be wise to skip next year’s event too.

What about “wrongheaded”? For that, let’s go to Freeman’s colleague Holman W. Jenkins Jr.:

They’re wrong not because they’re being mean to Trump (that’s like the Iran-Iraq war or a Bears–Vikings or Cubs–Cardinals game). They’re wrong because they’re wrong about government and economics.

And by the way, the people pulling their shoulders out of joint patting themselves on the back Saturday are those written about by Becket Adams for this idiocy:

It’s not what Bret Stephens said. It’s where he said it.

That’s the chief takeaway from the press’ collective freak-out this weekend over conservative columnist Bret Stephens’ debut article at the New York Times.

Stephens, who came to the Times after nearly 20 years with the Wall Street Journal, suggested in an op-ed concerning the fierce political debate surrounding climate change that, “if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.”

“[O]rdinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power,” he added.

Despite that he was careful to note he doesn’t “deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences,” the article left many reporters and pundits in a state of disbelief.

Vox.com’s David Roberts said Monday in a bluntly titled response article, “The New York Times should not have hired climate change bullshitter Bret Stephens.”

David Sirota, of the International Business Times added elsewhere, “False equivalence is a newspaper hiring a climate change denier in the name of manufacturing an artificial image of balance.”

Others declared proudly on social media that they had cancelled their subscriptions.

The reactions, though not entirely surprising, are amusing considering who Stephens is, and what he has done with himself for the last decade.

This Facebook meme says that Bill Nye the Science Guy is not a scientist. (If he were a competent engineer, he’d be working in engineering, not TV.) Nor is he a constitutional expert, as Michael Bastasch reports:

Bill Nye the “Science Guy” tried to claim the Constitution supported the concerns of thousands of scientists and environmental activists who took to the streets on Earth Day to protest the Trump administration’s proposed budget cuts to federal agencies.

“If you suppress science, if you pretend climate change isn’t a real problem, you will fall behind other countries that do invest in science, that do invest in basic research,” Nye told CNN Saturday as the “March for Science” took place.

The march took place in dozens of cities across the world, and the main march took place in Washington, D.C., Saturday. Nye spoke at the rally where thousands carried signs deriding skeptics of global warming and cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other bureaucracies that fund or conduct scientific research.

“And it is interesting to note, I think, that Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution refers to the progress of science and the useful arts,” Nye said.

“Useful arts in 18th Century usage would be what we call engineering or city planning or architecture,” Nye said.

Nye’s used the argument before to underscore how “unpatriotic” it is to not have the federal government hand out billions of taxpayer dollars to universities, corporations and research institutions.

“Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution says the government shall ‘promote the progress of science and useful arts,’” Nye told Vox in 2015 — Vox didn’t correct him or fact check his claim.

“So if you’re a politician looking to derail the progress of science, I think you’re not doing your job,” Nye said.

And, like last time, he’s 100 percent incorrect.

Nye is referring to the Constitution’s Copyright Clause. The clause is one in a laundry list of Congress’s enumerated powers.

It reads: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

The Copyright Clause has nothing to do with government-funded science, but everything to do with establishing a legal framework to protect intellectual property rights.

This is why Nye is not known as the “Constitution Guy.”

On the other hand, Nye’s not good on TV either when he’s required to not read from a script. Slate reports:

During the segment, William Happer, a physicist and climate change skeptic, argued that the Earth is getting greener and that carbon dioxide is good for the atmosphere. “There’s this myth that’s developed around carbon dioxide that it’s a pollutant, but you and I both exhale carbon dioxide with every breath. Each of us emits about two pounds of carbon dioxide a day, so are we polluting the planet?” Happer said. “Carbon dioxide is a perfectly natural gas, it’s just like water vapor, it’s something that plants love. They grow better with more carbon dioxide, and you can see the greening of the earth already from the additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

An obviously exasperated Nye responded: “What he claims to not understand is the rate. it’s the speed at which we’re adding carbon dioxide.” He latter accused Happer of “cherry picking a certain model” and that the consensus view on climate change “is not controversial in mainstream science.” Plus, Nye added, acting like climate change doesn’t exist is bad for the economy. “If you pretend that climate change isn’t a real problem, you will fall behind other countries that do invest in science—that do invest in basic research,” Nye said.

Boo hoo, Billy. Nye, it turns out, is nothing more than a poor entertainer who like all the envirowackos (see Gore, Al) wants to control our lives and gain for themselves political power and money.

For instance, John Nolte reports:

Yes, according to Nye’s guest Travis Rieder, who holds the creepy title of a Bioethics Ethicist, you and I and our precious children are what Rieder calls “individual emitters,” meaning we are inconvenient to the Greater Good because our individual emissions of carbon contribute to global warming (which is a hoax).

But we are not all guilty of doing “a lot of emitting.”

Even though they have one of the highest fertility rates in the world, the good people of Niger, according to Rieder, are totally awesome because they “are doing almost no emitting.”  Yes, these amazing people emit only “0.1 metric tons of carbon annually,” while we American pigs emit “160 times” that amount.

Oddly enough, though, what Nye and Rieder fail to tell us is that Niger is a hellhole of humanity that ranked as the country with the world’s worst standard of living in 2009, a standard that has only gotten worse since. The “absolute poverty rate” in Niger was 61% and climbing in 2012.

But when his guest mentioned Niger, Nye said approvingly, “They burn some charcoal [only] now and then.”

Well, when all you own is a wooden bowl, an old blanket, and herd of bed bugs…

Anyway, things then got super-creepy….

Billy Nye: So, should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?

Travis Rieder: I do think that we should at least consider it.

Bill Nye: Well, “at least consider it” is like “Do it.”

Travis Rieder: One of the things that we could do that’s kind of least policy-ish is we could encourage our culture and our norms to change, right?

Couple points…

1) HITLER!

2) Niger has an infant mortality rate of 71.2 deaths per 1000 live births — one of the highest in the world. America’s infant mortality rate, which the left-wing Washington Post called an “embarrassment,” is only 6.1 per 1000.

Life expectancy in Niger is 61 years (the same age as Tom Hanks!). Life expectancy in America is 79 years. America’s poor live like kings compared to the average Nigerian.

So maybe instead of penalizing developed countries, we should use all that activist energy to help develop Niger?

But the inhuman tyrants we call environmentalists actually fight against the modern development of countries like Niger. Like real-life Bond villains, all they care about is their golden calf of Gaia. While they sip lattes and burn more carbon with their television shows than I will in ten lifetimes, they are comforted by the fact that the people of Niger — although miserable, dying, exploited, and despairing — are living worse than animals do on American farms.

The other truth that goes unmentioned is that developed countries like ours are much, much, much cleaner than human hellholes like Niger. Our water and air is cleaner. We use much better methods to dispose of our garbage and sewage. We preserve, recycle, and replenish our natural resources. For example, no one plants more trees than the private logging industry. America has more trees today than we did 100 years ago. Nothing produces a clean environment better than private ownership. You take care of what is yours.

Developed countries that allow for human freedom are not the problem, they are the solution. People are not the problem, they are a blessing and the very ones who invent, create, and come up with the ideas that have, overall, improved both living and environmental conditions throughout the world.

But science-denying monsters like Bill Nye would have us believe the opposite is true. Because it is not about the science. It is about the depraved power that comes with controlling the lives of others.

Because I was working (and even had I not been working I have an actual life), I did not watch MSNBC’s revealing Donald Trump’s 2005 income taxes Tuesday night.

Fortunately for those who care, Legal Insurrection did so you and I didn’t have to:

Rachel Maddow has a history of claiming big scoops which then flop.

There was the debunked 2012 big scoop about supposed GOP wrongdoing in Michigan. And the 2014 big scoop that the Koch Brothers were behind Florida groups pushing drug testing for welfare recipients, which was not true. We covered the Florida non-scoop big scoop, Rachel Maddow’s come undone with Koch Derangement Syndrome.

[Tuesday] Maddow claimed to have Donald Trump’s tax returns. The internet lit up. …

The interest was stoked when the person who obtained the “tax returns” and was to appear on Maddow’s show tweeted out as similar message …

But very quickly, tax returns (plural) turned into Form 1040 from 2005.

The White House pushed back even before airtime:

The White House says President Donald Trump made more than $150 million in income in 2005 and paid $38 million in income taxes that year.

The acknowledgement comes as MSNBC host Rachel Maddow says she has obtained part of Trump’s 2005 tax forms.

The White House is pushing back pre-emptively, saying that publishing those returns would be illegal.

It says, “You know you are desperate for ratings when you are willing to violate the law to push a story about two pages of tax returns from over a decade ago.”

… As she was stalling, her secret source and guest published the information on his own website, which The Daily Beast then posted before Maddow made the reveal:

Donald Trump earned more than $150 million in the year 2005—and paid just a small percentage of that in regular federal income taxes. Daily Beast contributor David Cay Johnston has obtained what appear to be the first two pages of Trump’s 2005 federal income tax return, and published an analysis of those pages on his website, DCReport.org. The Daily Beast could not independently verify these documents.
The documents show Trump and his wife Melania paying $5.3 million in regular federal income tax—a rate of less than 4% However, the Trumps paid an additional $31 million in the so-called “alternative minimum tax,” or AMT. Trump has previously called for the elimination of this tax….

Trump’s 2005 return also shows that he’d continued to benefit from the roughly $916 million loss he reported in his 1995 return—published last year by The New York Times. Using a loophole Congress closed in 1996, Trump converted that loss into a tax credit for the same amount he could offset against income.

Tucker Carlson also reported on the story as Maddow was stalling …

So there was no there there.

If anything, Maddow helped Trump by showing the paid $38 million in taxes on $150 million of income. Hardly the narrative the Democrats like.

Not only did Maddow get scooped on her own scoop, there are two inconvenient facts, reported by Chicks on the Right:

The big story of the night is President Trump’s 2005 tax returns. As it turns out, he paid $38 million in taxes on over $150 million of income. Zero Hedge broke this down– he paid “$5.3 million in regular federal income tax, and an additional $31 million of ‘alternative minimum tax,’ or AMT.” …

Ah yes. Wasn’t Obama’s effective federal income tax rate 18.7 percent in 2015? And who could forget about everyone’s favorite senile socialist, Bernie Sanders?

Hannah Bleau @hannahbleau_

Trump 2005 tax rate: 25%
Romney 2011 tax rate: 14.1%
Sanders 2014 tax rate: 13.5%
Obama 2015 tax rate: 18.7%

Nate Silver has been researching the 2016 presidential election, starting with a comparison with Brexit earlier in 2016:

The U.S. presidential election, as I’ve argued here, was something of a similar case. No, the polls didn’t show a toss-up, as they had in Brexit. But the reporting was much more certain of Clinton’s chances than it should have been based on the polls. Much of The New York Times’s coverage, for instance, implied that Clinton’s odds were close to 100 percent. In an article on Oct. 17 — more than three weeks before Election Day — they portrayed the race as being effectively over, the only question being whether Clinton should seek a landslide or instead assist down-ballot Democrats:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is planning its most ambitious push yet into traditionally right-leaning states, a new offensive aimed at extending her growing advantage over Donald J. Trump while bolstering down-ballot candidates in what party leaders increasingly suggest could be a sweeping victory for Democrats at every level. […]

The maneuvering speaks to the unexpected tension facing Mrs. Clinton as she hurtles toward what aides increasingly believe will be a decisive victory — a pleasant problem, for certain, but one that has nonetheless scrambled the campaign’s strategy weeks before Election Day: Should Mrs. Clinton maximize her own margin, aiming to flip as many red states as possible to run up an electoral landslide, or prioritize the party’s congressional fortunes, redirecting funds and energy down the ballot?

This is not to say the election was a toss-up in mid-October, which was one of the high-water marks of the campaign for Clinton. But while a Trump win was unlikely, it should hardly have been unthinkable. As we were fond of pointing out at the time, Trump’s chances in mid-October were around 1-in-6 according to betting markets and FiveThirtyEight’s forecast, about the same as a chance of being shot while playing a “game” of Russian roulette. And yet the Times, famous for its “to be sure” equivocations,² wasn’t even contemplating the possibility of a Trump victory​. It expressed nearly as much confidence in Clinton two weeks later even after the polls tightened substantially after FBI director James B. Comey’s letter to Congress, at which point Trump’s odds jumped to about 1-in-3 in our forecast.”

It’s hard to reread this coverage without recalling Sean Trende’s essay on “unthinkability bias,” which he wrote in the wake of the Brexit vote. Just as was the case in the U.S. presidential election, voting on the referendum had split strongly along class, education and regional lines, with voters outside of London and without advanced degrees being much more likely to vote to leave the EU. The reporters covering the Brexit campaign, on the other hand, were disproportionately well-educated and principally based in London. They tended to read ambiguous signs — anything from polls to the musings of taxi drivers — as portending a Remain win, and many of them never really processed the idea that Britain could vote to leave the EU until it actually happened.

So did journalists in Washington and London make the apocryphal Pauline Kael mistake, refusing to believe that Trump or Brexit could win because nobody they knew was voting for them? That’s not quite what Trende was arguing. Instead, it’s that political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself until and unless there’s very compelling evidence for the contrary position. Social media, especially Twitter, can amplify the groupthink further. It can be an echo chamber.

I recently reread James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds” which, despite its name, spends as much time contemplating the shortcomings of such wisdom as it does celebrating its successes. Surowiecki argues⁵ that crowds usually make good predictions when they satisfy these four conditions:

1. Diversity of opinion. “Each person should have private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.”
2. Independence. “People’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.”
3. Decentralization. “People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.”
4. Aggregation. “Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.”

Political journalism scores highly on the fourth condition, aggregation. While Surowiecki usually has something like a financial or betting market in mind when he refers to “aggregation,” the broader idea is that there’s some way for individuals to exchange their opinions instead of keeping them to themselves. And my gosh, do political journalists have a lot of ways to share their opinions with one another, whether through their columns, at major events such as the political conventions or, especially, through Twitter.

But those other three conditions? Political journalism fails miserably along those dimensions.

Diversity of opinion? For starters, American newsrooms are not very diverse along racial or gender lines, and it’s not clear the situation is improving much.⁶ And in a country where educational attainment is an increasingly important predictor of cultural and political behavior, some 92 percent of journalists have college degrees. A degree didn’t used to be a de facto prerequisite<a class — “It’s not clear how many newsrooms require a college degree for their reporting positions — we usually don’t do so at FiveThirtyEight and a quick perusal of other job listings suggest that many other newsrooms also do not. But there may nonetheless be a lot of self-selection in which candidates seek out these jobs and who succeeds in the recruiting and hiring process for a reporting job; just 70 percent of journalists had college degrees in 1982 and only 58 percent did in 1971.

The political diversity of journalists is not very strong, either. As of 2013, only 7 percent of them identified as Republicans (although only 28 percent called themselves Democrats with the majority saying they were independents). And although it’s not a perfect approximation — in most newsrooms, the people who issue endorsements are not the same as the ones who do reporting — there’s reason to think that the industry was particularly out of sync with Trump. Of the major newspapers that endorsed either Clinton or Trump, only 3 percent (2 of 59) endorsed Trump. By comparison, 46 percent of newspapers to endorse either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney endorsed Romney in 2012. Furthermore, as the media has become less representative of right-of-center views — and as conservatives have rebelled against the political establishment — there’s been an increasing and perhaps self-reinforcing cleavage between conservative news and opinion outlets such as Breitbart and the rest of the media.

Although it’s harder to measure, I’d also argue that there’s a lack of diversity when it comes to skill sets and methods of thinking in political journalism. Publications such as Buzzfeed or (the now defunct) Gawker.com get a lot of shade from traditional journalists when they do things that challenge conventional journalistic paradigms. But a lot of traditional journalistic practices are done by rote or out of habit, such as routinely granting anonymity to staffers to discuss campaign strategy even when there isn’t much journalistic merit in it. Meanwhile, speaking from personal experience, I’ve found the reception of “data journalists” by traditional journalists to be unfriendly, although there have been exceptions.

Independence? This is just as much of a problem. Crowds can be wise when people do a lot of thinking for themselves before coming together to exchange their views. But since at least the days of “The Boys on the Bus,” political journalism has suffered from a pack mentality. Events such as conventions and debates literally gather thousands of journalists together in the same room; attend one of these events, and you can almost smell the conventional wisdom being manufactured in real time. (Consider how a consensus formed that Romney won the first debate in 2012 when it had barely even started, for instance.) Social media — Twitter in particular — can amplify these information cascades, with a single tweet receiving hundreds of thousands of impressions and shaping the way entire issues are framed. As a result, it can be largely arbitrary which storylines gain traction and which ones don’t. What seems like a multiplicity of perspectives might just be one or two, duplicated many times over.

Decentralization? Surowiecki writes about the benefit of local knowledge, but the political news industry has become increasingly consolidated in Washington and New York as local newspapers have suffered from a decade-long contraction. That doesn’t necessarily mean local reporters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Ohio should have picked up Trumpian vibrations on the ground in contradiction to the polls. But as we’ve argued, national reporters often flew into these states with pre-baked narratives — for instance, that they were “decreasingly representative of contemporary America” — and fit the facts to suit them, neglecting their importance to the Electoral College. A more geographically decentralized reporting pool might have asked more questions about why Clinton wasn’t campaigning in Wisconsin, for instance, or why it wasn’t more of a problem for her that she was struggling in polls of traditional bellwethers such as Ohio and Iowa. If local newspapers had been healthier economically, they might also have commissioned more high-quality state polls; the lack of good polling was a problem in Michigan and Wisconsin especially.

There was once a notion that whatever challenges the internet created for journalism’s business model, it might at least lead readers to a more geographically and philosophically diverse array of perspectives. But it’s not clear that’s happening, either. Instead, based on data from the news aggregation site Memeorandum, the top news sources (such as the Times, The Washington Post and Politico) have earned progressively more influence over the past decade:

The share of total exposure for the top five news sources⁹ climbed from roughly 25 percent a decade ago to around 35 percent last year, and has spiked to above 40 percent so far in 2017. While not a perfect measure¹⁰, this is one sign the digital age hasn’t necessarily democratized the news media. Instead, the most notable difference in Memeorandum sources between 2007 and 2017 is the decline of independent blogs; many of the most popular ones from the late ’aughts either folded or (like FiveThirtyEight) were bought by larger news organizations. Thus, blogs and local newspapers — two of the better checks on Northeast Corridor conventional wisdom run amok — have both had less of a say in the conversation.

All things considered, then, the conditions of political journalism are poor for crowd wisdom and ripe for groupthink. So … what to do about it, then?

Initiatives to increase decentralization would help, although they won’t necessarily be easy. Increased subscription revenues at newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post is an encouraging sign for journalism, but a revival of local and regional newspapers — or a more sustainable business model for independent blogs — would do more to reduce groupthink in the industry.

Likewise, improving diversity is liable to be a challenge, especially because the sort of diversity that Surowiecki is concerned with will require making improvements on multiple fronts (demographic diversity, political diversity, diversity of skill sets). Still, the research Surowiecki cites is emphatic that there are diminishing returns to having too many of the same types of people in small groups or organizations. Teams that consist entirely of high-IQ people may underperform groups that contain a mix of high-IQ and medium-IQ participants, for example, because the high-IQ people are likely to have redundant strengths and similar blind spots.

That leaves independence. In some ways the best hope for a short-term fix might come from an attitudinal adjustment: Journalists should recalibrate themselves to be more skeptical of the consensus of their peers. That’s because a position that seems to have deep backing from the evidence may really just be a reflection from the echo chamber. You should be looking toward how much evidence there is for a particular position as opposed to how many people hold that position: Having 20 independent pieces of evidence that mostly point in the same direction might indeed reflect a powerful consensus, while having 20 like-minded people citing the same warmed-over evidence is much less powerful. Obviously this can be taken too far and in most fields, it’s foolish (and annoying) to constantly doubt the market or consensus view. But in a case like politics where the conventional wisdom can congeal so quickly — and yet has so often been wrong — a certain amount of contrarianism can go a long way.