I'm Bob Garfield with an on-the-media podcast Extra.

Last Tuesday, Donald Trump won the Indiana primary and became the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party.

In the days that followed, ink was spilled and hands were wrung, including two pieces in the New York Times,

over the question, how did we get this so wrong?

In a piece titled, The Republican Horse Race is Over and Journalism Lost,

Times columnist Jim Rutenberg was particularly critical of so-called data journalism,

which a mere one election cycle ago seemed so heroic, but in Trump

world turned out to have feet of clay. Rutenberg singled out Nate Silver's 538, our partner, this

election cycle, and the Times own, the upshot. On the dangers of relying on polling data, Rutenberg wrote that six months ago,

when 538 gave Trump a 2% chance of winning the nomination, the low probability, quote,

sapped the journalistic will to scour his record as aggressively as those of his supposedly

more serious rivals.

In other words, predictions can have consequences.

Nate Silver on his podcast this week had a response to Wittenberg and all the other data detractors.

We're going to play an excerpt from that episode in which you'll also hear Silver's 538 colleagues, Harry Enton,

and Claire Malone. Host Jody Avergan kicked off the discussion asking Nate what questions

he thinks the media at large should be asking in the wake of Trump's win. Well, the number one question

is, how did a demagogue win a major party nomination? You know, there was a piece over the weekend that came out about Donald Trump and fact-checking, and not only does he have the worst record that fact-check.org and whatever else I've ever tracked, but he doesn't even bother to respond to fact-checks anymore. It's a purely post-empirical world,

but Republicans at least tend to trust them. They tend not to trust the media. A lot of chickens

have come home to roost. Meanwhile, this is a guy that got blanket wall-to-wall coverage,

70% of the coverage of the GOP primary when you originally had 17 candidates.

So, you know, first check your own bed and see if it's in order.

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