Washminster

Washminster
Washminster

Tuesday, 13 March 2012

How good are the pundits?

Political coverage (and sports; and entertainment....) is increasingly dominated by "pundits" - people who give their "analysis" of events. They trade on an aura of expertise - but are they any good? I am a listener to the podcast by WNYC "On the Media". In their latest  podcast they feature a piece on holding pundits to account for their predictions.

The website that was featured is pundittracker - http://blog.pundittracker.com/. It goes live this spring, but in the meantime features a blog. It is not limited to the political pundits, but looks at those who make predictions about sport; the Oscars; and finance. It uses statistics to get a picture about performance. We are now accustomed to the words of politicians coming under the microscope with such websites as FactCheck - but now the pundits themselves can be checked. Not a bad thing when "framing the debate" is often more important than the details of the issues.