The earlier post Narratives delved into some of the reasons for the failures of media to report accurately or do useful analyses of events. The dominant leftward tilt of the media was one explanation but that was further decomposed into a propensity for gloom in western thought, especially on the left, and the odd effects of group dynamics in which views tend to slide toward the grim.

It may also be a competition of sorts. [via A&L Daily]

Until recently, no one knew who is right, because no one was keeping score. But the results of a 20-year research project now suggest that the skeptics are closer to the truth.

I describe the project in detail in my book Expert Political Judgment: How good is it? How can we know? The basic idea was to solicit thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts about the fates of dozens of countries, and then score the predictions for accuracy. We find that the media not only fail to weed out bad ideas, but that they often favor bad ideas, especially when the truth is too messy to be packaged neatly.

The evidence falls into two categories. First, as the skeptics warned, when hordes of pundits are jostling for the limelight, many are tempted to claim that they know more than they do. Boom and doom pundits are the most reliable over-claimers.

Between 1985 and 2005, boomsters made 10-year forecasts that exaggerated the chances of big positive changes in both financial markets (e.g., a Dow Jones Industrial Average of 36,000) and world politics (e.g., tranquility in the Middle East and dynamic growth in sub-Saharan Africa). They assigned probabilities of 65% to rosy scenarios that materialized only 15% of the time.

In the same period, doomsters performed even more poorly, exaggerating the chances of negative changes in all the same places where boomsters accentuated the positive, plus several more (I still await the impending disintegration of Canada, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Belgium, and Sudan). They assigned probabilities of 70% to bleak scenarios that materialized only 12% of the time.

Pick a news article or a pundit column, any one will do, and rip it to shreds. You are almost assured of being more correct than the item you attack. But it's no about correctness, it's about mind share. They are usually wrong, but also often entertaining, and so popular. You may be more right but you are boring and so deserve your oblivion.

Here, then, is a modest proposal that applies to all democracies: the marketplace of ideas works better if it is easier for citizens to see the trade-offs between accuracy and entertainment, or between accuracy and party loyalty. Wouldn’t they be more likely to read pundits with better track records? If so, pundits might adapt to accountability by showing more humility, and political debate might begin to sound less shrill.

Granted, it is not easy to create methods of keeping score that are credible across the spectrum of reasonable opinion. But in a world where, as Yeats said, “and the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” it is worth trying.

I don't think that this would work because I don't think that people will "be more likely to read pundits with better track records". Punditry is not about correctness. The media is not about accuracy. Politics is not about truth, honor, honesty or any of those things. It is a mistake to try to tidy up these activities and institutions, a misunderstanding of their role and function in society. It's best not to take them seriously, and if we work for change it would be more useful to seek to reduce their power and influence. Reducing the scope and scale of governance institutions is simple good sense as they and their supporting institutions are irredeemably flawed. Even if a benign despot "fixed" them somehow we would mung them up again since we like them that way.