Come Back, Steve Brill, All is Forgiven!

You might have seen that Max puts the Boot into Seymour Hersh's reporting today. Boot's ledger is decidedly (and understandably) one-sided -- Hersh is given little credit for ever being right about important things, or for being first in being right -- but the exercise recalls the one single useful feature in the otherwise dreary (and conflict-riddled) Brill's Content magazine: The Pundit Scorecard, in which Sabbath Gasbags had their flatulent predictions actually counted up, and ranked. I would love it if there were similar non-partisanish scorecards today for talkshow hosts, sports columnists, bloggers, opinion journalists, investigative reporters … though as I argued last Arpil, we are far more likely to see such efforts from partisans.

Comments

[Jesse Walker]

Let's start with a scorecard for Boot.

[Ryan O.]

For a while I had kept a listing of McLaughlin Group predictions with the goal of eventually scoring those folks and seeing who came out champion. Unfortunately I got bored with the project and stopped keeping the list. I ought to go back and see if there are any in there I can score now...

[gaius marius]

lol -- boot picks up where perle left off. apparently the persecution complex in the neocon camp is intact.

[jhz]

I actually got started on a project like that, with the working title "Pundit Tracker." It soon got unwieldy, and it wasn't something I could do well in my spare time. (Paul Ehrlich - a very juicy, low-hanging fruit - all by himself took up most of August '03.)

So, if anyone reading this has access to a squad of research assistants, a Lexis/Nexis account, and the urge to see something like this happen, drop me a line.

[Les Jones]

I tracked pundit and blogger predictions for the 2004 election. Quick turnaround time on that sort of one-off prediction.