Who Wants Accuracy?

A well-connected reporter (who I promised I’d keep anonymous) just told me that a major Washington media organization started a project studying major media pundits, and a big part of this project was assessing individual pundit forecast track records. After several months of several folks working on the project, it was killed, supposedly because management decided readers don’t care as much about pundit accuracy as they’d previous thought.

Of course that need not have been their real reason – perhaps some folks didn’t like the ratings it was giving to their favorite pundits. Or perhaps it died for any of a hundred random reasons projects are killed. Even so, I found this anecdote interesting.