| Pemalite said: Good news sources exist. If you opt for ones that actually have all the empirical evidence and citations to backup their claims. |
I wish I could still trust those sources. I was a huge fan of fivethirtyeight.com from 2008-2016 and loved data journalism in general. I always knew Nate Silver (From fivethirtyeight) was a liberal but never doubted the he presented the facts as they were. Then came the 2016 primaries and Silver and his colleagues continuously misread every poll and number imaginable because they clearly showed Trump was about to win. Then they proceeded to say Trump had no chance to win the presidency for a long time. I've been pretty burned from data journalism ever since because as a data journalist you can spin numbers in a lot of ways to support your political agenda (confirmation bias) and people will be even more influenced by that than your average news report - because hey, it's all backed up with numbers, right?
Same in the german elections: The AfD (right-wing party), of which I was NOT a fan, polled at about 8% for months. Then, a week before the elections, pollsters suddenly had AfD numbers rise to above 10% and they got 12.6% in the elections, higher than any pollster predicted. And the low polling numbers continuously had been used by the media to tell people that no one wanted to vote AfD, the AfD was a Nazi party, etc. Also, the boss of one of the biggest german polling institutes Forsa, always commented on his institutes' numbers and used to spin them (in hindsight it definitely was spinning) to tell people how unpopular the AfD was. I voted liberal in the elections but I later regretted not voting AfD - because the behaviours shown by polling institutes and the media was very, very undemocratic in my opinion: Basically scaring people away from voting AfD by using numbers and stats which turned out to be wrong (and they must have known at that point because they had underestimated the AfD in literally every single local election in the year before).
