The new breed of pundits doesn’t recognize that political questions are matters of value, not simply fact.
It’s too bad someone can’t show David Hume the latest explainer from Vox. He needs to know how badly he’s been destroyed. One of the 18th-century Scottish philosopher’s most famous ideas, the fact–value distinction, has been dispensed with by the trendiest subset of pundits around. This group is composed of those who believe that values — judgments about the way things should be — can be explained in terms of facts — judgments about the way things are, and they rebut Hume simply by ignoring him.
The pundits in question would recoil at the title. Working for websites like Vox, FiveThirtyEight, or Politifact, where “pundit” is a dirty word for “old-school opinion journalist,” they do not dispense opinion. Instead they are bringing empirical standards to bear on a rotted profession. Ezra Klein says his mission as editor-in-chief of Vox is simple: “Explain the news.” Vox, by Klein’s own lights, is dedicated to providing readers with “the crucial contextual information necessary to understand” what’s going on in the world. Nate Silver, the statistician behind FiveThirtyEight, is motivated by a perceived deficiency of “rigorous and empirical” standards of objectivity in journalism. FiveThirtyEight, he says, is dedicated to using statistical methods in an effort “to find the signal in the noise.” They promise certitude in a world of confusion, recalling the old impulse to replace political conflict with bland technocracy. And then there are the fact-checkers, who, whether using a cutesy “Pinocchio” system like the Washington Post, or a “Truth-O-Meter” like Politifact, purport to offer readers a verdict free of bias. Pundits, these people would tell you, are just stuffy old men who churn out tired columns full of opinion and free of evidence, exactly what they are here to correct.
Granted, these sites can be thoughtful. There is often great stuff on FiveThirtyEight, and even sometimes on Vox. Their opinions are sometimes worth taking seriously? And of course fact-checking is an important thing to do, when it’s done honestly. But honesty and thoughtfulness are unfortunately not the dominant practices in so-called objective journalism.
Instead, writers on these sites make sweeping claims while callously overlooking the values that animate them. They present themselves as having tracked down the objective truth, but fail to recognize the value judgments they made along the way. These value judgments are both epistemological — dealing with knowledge — and normative — dealing with morals. Fact-checkers use fluid, arbitrary scales to make absolute claims about what is or is not the case. Too often, they fail to situate empirical claims in the normative arguments from which they derive.
Politifact rated Donald Trump’s claim that “crime is rising” a bald-faced lie, giving it the “Pants On Fire” label. Never mind that, as evidence shows, violent crime has indeed risen in 2016. For Politifact, “the overall trend of falling crime rates over the past 25 years” is sufficient to give Trump their lowest rating. Trump may have misled, but his statement wasn’t false.
What’s (capital-T, with a helpful green light) True, on the other hand, is Hillary Clinton’s claim that Trump’s “proposed tax treatment of hedge-fund managers ‘makes the current loophole even worse.’” They cite as evidence the “benefit” that “many hedge-fund managers would receive” from a tax cut, and contend that it’s irrelevant that the plan cuts taxes for the middle class as well. According to Politifact, hedge-fund managers’ receiving benefits is a bad thing. In the first case, the truth is a lie; in the second, values are facts.
The Washington Post has its own fact-checker, with similar results. Ted Cruz earned himself “three Pinocchios” in the Post’s Fact Checker blog for claiming that Arizona’s immigration law resulted in the state’s “spending hundreds of millions less on prisons, on education, on hospitals, for those here illegally.” While the “state saved money on education and health care after the law passed,” Cruz failed to rule out other explanations for the drop in spending. Meanwhile, Barack Obama deserves two Pinocchios for his invocation of the gender wage gap.
What is most pathetic about fact-checkers is how little their judgments actually bear on the relevant arguments. Consider the two arguments in which Cruz’s and Obama’s statements were situated. Cruz believes the U.S. should curb illegal immigration because citizens ought not to fund social services of noncitizens. Obama believes that women are systematically discriminated against across several social domains. Irrespective of their plausibility, neither argument is discredited by a few Pinocchio graphics. Fact-checkers, in their hubris, think they can foreclose entire political positions.
Data journalists are not immune. Nate Silver was skeptical of Trump’s rise in the 2016 primaries, and prostrated himself after the unthinkable came to pass. Among other things, he argued that a supposed ceiling of support among Republicans, the forbidding power of the party machinery, and a lack of all-important endorsements were ample evidence to ignore . . . the mounting evidence that Trump was an overwhelming favorite. Carl Diggler, a fictional pundit created by two Twitter personalities, outpaced Silver’s predictions. Virgil Texas, one of Diggler’s creators, noted in a scathing op-ed: “Despite the pretense of scientific detachment, Silver’s models are hardly unbiased.” And indeed FiveThirtyEight’s polls-plus model consistently undervalued Trump’s chances. Texas continued: “The moment you decide to weight some data sets over others, you’ve introduced bias.” Silver’s talk about objective standards concealed his belief that some information was more valuable than other information.
But the explainers are the worst of the bunch. Their supposed injection of “context” is often little more than camouflage for politicking. Vox writers cherish the idea that they are disentangling bias from the narrative, but the “particular historical circumstances of the 1990s . . . created the image of the scandal-ridden Clintons” only if you deny the Clintons’ agency; Brexit was “fueled by irrational xenophobia” only if you reject the classical understanding of sovereignty; and Barack Obama is “officially one of the most consequential presidents in American history” only if your conception of “consequential” depends on your political biases. But I’m sure one can explain these apparent confusions of fact and value with context.
Return to Hume’s argument about values and facts. Like much in philosophy, it is not settled doctrine. But one does not have to agree with his thesis to recognize the problem. Hume denied that the truth of moral values — judgments about what ought to be — can be discerned. Some, including Hume himself, take the fact–value distinction and fit it into a position of radical empiricism, according to which the only things that can be known with certainty are empirical facts: What is can be known; what ought to be cannot. Still others, convinced of the veracity of certain moral propositions, take a position known as moral realism: We can indeed know what ought to be. One might claim that the well-being of society ought to be valued over the property rights of individuals, and therefore wealth should be redistributed; another might counter that people have a duty to respect the voluntary decisions of society, and therefore it should not. Both parties to this debate are making moral claims, and moral realists would counsel that such claims can indeed be true or false. Regardless of whether or not values can have determinate truth, though, the point remains: What is cannot settle arguments about what ought to be.
Yet that is precisely what the wonks are attempting. Readers are invited to read their work to know what values they should adopt, with no regard to meddling questions of context. They’ve answered those already! These new-style journalists build ignorance of a basic intellectual pillar into their enterprise, yet their self-regard is second to none. There’s a word for a political writer who passes off thinly supported, poorly argued rhetoric for genuine thought: pundit.