Fact, interpretation, and talk radio.

I generally ignore talk-radio/FOX News conservatives, but for some reason I'm fascinated by the John Ziegler / Zogby poll. Ziegler is a former AM radio personality in the Limbaugh mold who wanted “to try and identify which news stories broke through the clutter and reached the average Obama voter.”

The relevant links:

• HowObamaGotElected.com, the site Ziegler created to promote the results.
• Nate Silver's original attack on Ziegler's method, in which he overstates the case by calling Ziegler's survey a “push poll.”
• The transcript of Nate Silver's interview with Ziegler, in which Ziegler flips out as Silver asks him simple questions for context. Silver created the transcript, so it's possible that he's deliberately making himself look calmer than he was, but given the persona that each man tries to project—Ziegler the outraged populast, Silver the levelheaded numbers guy—this doesn't seem very likely.
• The Wall Street Journal's Numbers Guy blog's critique of Ziegler's questions. (Verdict: Ziegler's interpretation of his results is by no means unassailable.)
• Ziegler's aggressive response to the challenges, in which he maintains that “[t]here was ABSOLUTELY ZERO DOUBT as to who the answer any of the questions [sic].”
• Nate Silver's reflections on his encounter with Ziegler, which end in media criticism: “Invariably, the times when Ziegler became really, really angry with me during the interview was when I was not permitting him to be stimulating, but instead asking him specific, banal questions that required specific, banal answers. Those questions would have made for terrible radio! And Ziegler had no idea how to answer them.”
• The 2005 David Foster Wallace article¹, from which Silver quotes extensively, and which is the key to the whole brouhaha, and which, despite its length, is well worth reading.
  

We all know, or should know, that all info-tainment commentary thrives on a constant conflation of fact and interpretation. I suppose I can agree that every assertion of fact already contains some act of interpretation, but this doesn't render the distinction useless.

If I put forward an assertion as a fact, I am assuming that a generalized conversation partner will accept it and its epistemological baggage into the conversation, or that if it is challenged I can easily support it with resources that will be accepted by my conversation partners. When I put forward an assertion as an interpretation is one, I anticipate resistance, or realize that I don't have the resources for a conclusive proof at hand but want to persuade anyway.

My categorization of a particular assertion can change in the course of a conversation. When challenged, I may find that something I took to be a fact does not hold up in other valid epistemological frameworks, and perhaps doesn't really hold up in my own. (I suppose the problem could be a refusal to admit that other valid epistemological frameworks even exist, but that admission seems pretty crucial to democracy, pluralism, and basic human decency.) On the other hand, in the course of attempting to persuade someone of an interpretation, I may stumble upon evidence that moves my guess into the realm of fact, or simply discover that my interpretation is so widely shared that it can be taken for granted.

What is important here is a certain flexibility in classification. Needless to say, this sort of flexibility would spell doom for Ziegler-style talk-radio pseudo-populism.

¹INTERROBANG.