Expert Accountability

Submitted by kzndr (United States), Jun 12, 2011 at 22:38

Dear Mr. Pipes,

I appreciate and am always interested by your analysis. In this case, I believe your prediction is ... overblown, but I will continue to read with interest your coverage of Turkey. I do have one request, however. A recurrent problem in the contemporary media is a lack of expert accountability (to be clear, I am not criticizing you in particular). You are making a bold prediction, but I fear that it is phrased softly enough--"likely" is fuzzy and "free" and "fair" admit of many degrees--that in the future it will not be clear whether you have been vindicated or not. Can you outline some specific criteria by which your prediction might be judged (e.g. is there an organization whose imprimatur would signal to you that future elections were in fact fair, within how many election cycles can we expect the elections to no longer be fair, etc.)?

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