Nate Silver:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/feature...p-russia-story-is-smoke-and-how-much-is-fire/
natesilver: I’d say that it’s obviously a worthy subject for reporting.
But there definitely is more smoke than fire so far and there’s been some tendency for claims to be overdrawn.
As
I wrote last month,
these stories tend to die if they don’t provide specifics — and often they don’t.
clare.malone: Which is amazing, given how much stories used to stick just if they gave the appearance of impropriety.
perry: The
Jeff Sessions and
Michael Flynn contacts with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. and the resulting controversies were a kind of fire. I think The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza
wrote recently — and I agree with him — that we have something like a cover-up without evidence of a crime (so far).
clare.malone: Thing on the Russia story is how much it’s been back and forth. Take
this story from October — the headline on that said “no clear link.” So what people took away was, “no link!”
micah: Which is a reasonable reading. It’s very confusing.
clare.malone: And then a couple of months later, we find ourselves here, with a new spin on that story — still no clear link, but as Perry said, people have been acting awfully suspicious.
natesilver:
I think that Oct. 31 story from the The New York Times that Clare linked to really does not hold up well in light of their subsequent reporting.
perry: Agree.
micah: And I’d add the confusion of churn. So, weirdly, we didn’t actually learn anything new on Russia on Monday, yet there’s a new spate of stories. So the smoke-to-fire ratio gets bigger.
perry: Well, the FBI director saying his agency is investigating the campaign of the sitting president feels like a big story, even if not new?
clare.malone: Roger that.
micah: It’s definitely a big story, it’s just not new. And it’s hard to keep track of what’s new and what’s not.
clare.malone: Too much #content.
micah: Yes.
natesilver: It all feels sort of Groundhog Day-ish to me. But I read a lot of news, so things that might be “already knew that” to me might be new to members of the public.
This is one possible way the Russians view Trump
