1/ The more times I read the @jmartNYT and @maggieNYT analysis nominally probing if Russian intervention made a difference in the election, I'm struck by 2 things: its CYA tilt and its strangely bad sourcing.
2/ The CYA tilt first: About 1/3 of the article's 1428 word count recounts the GOP argument that Clinton lost because she sucked as a candidate and a range of reporting to suggest this was in fact the case....
3/ On one hand, this is the necessary alternate hypothesis to test: Clinton would have lost w. or w/o Russian interference for reasons that had nothing to do with a foreign attack on our election. But the problem lies with the way Martin and Haberman test that hypothesis...
4/...or rather, the way they don't. They assert it, through their (self-interested) GOP sources, and then they examine the reasons it might be so, from campaign surrogate deployment to other issues. They never actually a/b the question: why turnout in MI etc. drop?...
5/ That is: what proportion of the factors that swung the election can be attributed to Clinton decisions vs. Russian interventions? Why don't they? Two reasons, it seems to me. One is that such probing of the data is very, very hard, for lots of reasons...
6/ The other is that Martin and Haberman, their colleagues and their editors blew their coverage in 2016. We know it and they know it: @nytimes drastically over reported and overhyped EMAILZ, and brutally under and mis-reported Trump-Russia. This ain't a question anymore...
7/ So now, confronted with a growing pile of evidence showng how significant the Russia story & and is, & thus how truly and heroically bad were the Times' editorial choices in '16, this story reads, in part, like an attempt at exculpation. Yeah. We blew it. But it didn't matter.
8/ The other aspect of this story that galls me offers a hint of why @nytpolitics coverage remains at best erratic, & sometimes awful. Haberman and Martin are simply the wrong people to do this story, & not only because their work in '16 was prominent among that wh. needs cover.
9/ Think about the question at the heart of the piece: did a variety of Russian interventions, mostly in social media, have an impact on close state by-state results? Who has the expertise, the research history and technical knowledge to answer such a question?...
10/ Spoiler alert: it's not the political operatives Martin & Haberman know and quote, at least not on a primary, dig into the data level. (And this leaves aside someone like Steve Bannon's interest in being untruthful if and as interference/collusion becomes yet more plausible.)
11/ @nytimes has a problem covering Trump-era politics that extends beyond their access-focus and establishmentarian impulses. In some cases, maybe lots of the time, and certainly in this instance: the process/movie criticism approach to politics misses the point...
12/ It literally doesn't matter to the question of what impact Russian interference had what strategists for either Trump or Clinton assert. You have to speak to actual domain experts to even begin to get a handle on the range of potential effects...
13/ Which is to say that Haberman and Martin's whole reporting arsenal is exactly the wrong one here: they have access to top staffers and operatives, but they do not seem to be beat-knowledgeable reporters here themselves, and they didn't talk to anyone who could help them...
14/ That's a minor indictment of the 2 bylined reporters, but it's really a window onto the larger problem of @nytimes political coverage in general. What they're best at isn't revealing of anything but the drama of politics...
15/ The substance, either as policy or in deep understanding of the process as it's evolving in the 21st century media and money environment, eludes them. And I think it's not because they don't want to cover inconvenient stories...
16/ (or not simply or always that), but because they have a reporting and editing staff weighted too heavily towards cleverness and connections and not enough to those w. the kind of knowledge and skills needed to cover technically complicated stories of politics....
17/ There are in fact a lot of such skilled and beat-by-beat really masterful reporters at the Times; I won't name my favorites for fear of tarnishing them in the eyes of their newsroom (where, to the trivial extent in which my screeds are noticed at all, they can't be welcome).
18/ But the politics desk and the DC bureau (and much of the opinion shop) are not where those virtues stand out. Until the paper recognizes what it does not know/do well institutionally, the organ of record will continue its dalliance w. "coulda been a contender" status. /fin
