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I have quite a few different thoughts on this.
1) People inside the bubble (includes Ezra & me) have difficulty understanding what people hear outside the bubble. That's a challenging problem. Our gut impressions are often way wrong. It's good to validate against external data.
1) People inside the bubble (includes Ezra & me) have difficulty understanding what people hear outside the bubble. That's a challenging problem. Our gut impressions are often way wrong. It's good to validate against external data.
2. Almost all media is now niche media. Lots of seemingly popular/influential news products have audiences of only 10s or 100s of thousands of people or low 7 figures at most. That's not a lot in a country of 327 million people. That makes media analysis harder than it once was.
3. There are a lot of very complicated feedback loops between and among "the audience" and "the media". It's hard to know who is influencing who. The causality is difficult to tease out. It's especially difficult in the primaries, where "party elites" also play a role.
4. Media tracking metrics could be a lot better and a lot more standardized.
5. A lot of what's branded as *descriptive* analysis about the media ("candidate X isn't getting enough coverage") would be better as prescriptive analysis ("candidate X *should* get more coverage").
5. A lot of what's branded as *descriptive* analysis about the media ("candidate X isn't getting enough coverage") would be better as prescriptive analysis ("candidate X *should* get more coverage").
6. In general, in cases where person X makes a claim without data, and person Y provides some reasonable data that contradicts the claim, I think burden is on person X to provide better data to counter Y's claim. There are exceptions to this, e.g. when Y is arguing in bad faith.
7. News organizations should think more deliberately *and communicate with their readers* about how they decide to allocate coverage between the candidates. I'm not sure 538 has always done a great job with this, but you can see some of our thinking there: 53eig.ht/2OtapTJ
8. Subject to all the caveats and limitations above, of the various candidates I've covered, the Buttigieg surge feels pretty darn organic and not especially media-driven. People are genuinely interested in him to an extent that's surprised me.
