This is the 9th article in a series that reviews news coverage of the 2016 general election. ' Journalists should recalibrate themselves to be more skeptical of the consensus of their peers, because a position that seems to have deep backing from the evidence may really just be a reflection from the echo chamber. They 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 not, 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 be wrong — a certain amount of contrarianism can go a long way.'
At fivethirtyeight.com
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