Journalists v. the Political Scientist

Thomas Frank and Ezra Klein are resurrecting an old fight in the blogosphere. It’s the political scientists v. the journalist debate.

Here’s the back and forth — Ezra Klein says that political science transformed political journalism. It’s written in the Vox style, which is little too preachy and simplistic for my taste. But I’m not the audience for Vox, and it’s doing very well reaching people, so whatever. Then Thomas Frank overreacted and wrote an angry column talking about all the times that the experts fucked up and ranting about the lack of attention to non-experts and dissent views. Klein responded by saying that Frank’s real problem is that political scientist research doesn’t support his views of American politics.

We return to this fight over and over, because journalists and political scientists tread on the same turf. They are both watching the same football game, but one is on the field rubbing shoulders with the quarterback, the other is on the bleachers looking at the players with binoculars, while inputting plays from a thousand games into a laptop. You get a very different perspective on events when you can smell the sweat from the players, rather than the safe distance in nose-bleeding seats.

Both both perspectives are valuable. I want both. I want the journalist who can exquisitely describe the dirt on the players knees. I want the dude on the bleachers who can give me the big picture and tell me how this quarterback compares to all the quarterbacks who play in the state over the past twenty years. The true genius is the guy who can do both, but that’s not an easy trick. People tend to specialize in details or the big picture and that’s just fine. As long as I have both perspectives at my disposal, I can zoom back and forth on my own.

UPDATE: Dan Drezner responds to Frank, too. And Jonathan Chait.