While the political parties are conducting the post mortems of their political campaigns, members of the media are also scribbling up report cards of the campaign and considering whether they got it right. Fairfax’s Matthew Knott wrote a story asking if the press gallery had “got it wrong” and questioning if press gallery groupthink was to blame:
“Several ideas took hold quickly in the gallery’s collective brain. That Australians don’t kick out a first term government (despite this happening recently at a state level). And that Malcolm Turnbull’s personal popularity was a decisive advantage against the less prime ministerial Shorten.
“Many of us even convinced ourselves that the low-energy, small-target campaign was a clever way of ‘boring’ voters into backing the Coalition.”
Although including himself in the group that missed the signs, Knott has been in for criticism from press gallery colleagues, mostly through Twitter. But then there was this assessment in Mark Kenny’s column in today’s Fairfax papers, in which Kenny writes “election 2016, is notable for the self-appointed media experts who, in an ironic example of premature conclusion drawing — their key complaint about professional pundits — have loudly condemned the ‘MSM’ for accurately reporting public surveys, and for suggesting a Turnbull win was the more likely result. It turned out it was.”
Subtle much?
Matthew Knott had his wires crossed in his Fairfax article. Everyone knows that state governments have recently been kicked out after one term, but the record with first term federal governments has been quite different (none defeated since 1931) and, despite close calls in 2010 and 2016, this remains the case. Too much commentary on the election has been based on the atmosphere and premature calls on the night rather than on what has been revealed by the count as it has progressed. Nearly every seat in the ABC’s current doubtfuls list had been assigned to Labor on the night: methodology might need some fine tuning.
To conclude that a Turnbull victory ex post confirms that it was the most likely outcome ex ante is to demonstrate an understanding of statistics that would embarrass a six year old. Could this innumeracy be a part of the explanation for the phenomenon in question? Well, the media missed the call and Kenny is innumerate so yes! I guess it turns out it is!