THE UNDYING TRUTH OF ‘YES, VIRGINIA’

YOU would think, in this year of fake news, that editors would know better than to try to cast doubt on The New York Sun’s reply to Virginia O’Hanlon about Santa Claus. It’s one of the greatest scoops in the history of news. Yet the political Web site FiveThirtyEight failed to get the memo. One of its writers references the Sun’s reply to the 8-year-old girl who, in 1897, wrote the famous letter saying her father trusted the paper to answer the question of whether Santa is for real. “The Sun promptly lied to her,” FiveThirtyEight’s writer avers. Let me just say, in my capacity as the editor of the Sun, I resent that kind of language. Particularly from a Web site that led its hapless readers to believe that Hillary Clinton was likely to win the presidential election. I mean, who made up that story? It’s not just that the Sun told the truth to Virginia, who had informed the paper that some of her “little friends” claimed there is no Santa. From her townhouse on West 95th Street, she wrote that she wanted to know the truth.

The Sun’s reply is the most widely reprinted piece of journalism — ever.

“Virginia, your little friends are wrong,” the Sun wrote. “They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.”

That’s precisely the problem that caused FiveThirtyEight — named for the 538 members of the Electoral College it covers — to get the election so wrong. As late as Election Day, it gave Donald Trump only a 29 percent chance of winning.

Three days later, a humiliated Nate Silver, the editor of FiveThirtyEight, tried to make the best of it. He issued a backhanded boast that his Web site had been less wrong than other models tracked by The New York Times.

No doubt. But what kind of journalistic standard of excellence is that?

Even when voting booths were almost closed, The Upshot column in the Times issued a headline blaring “Hillary Clinton has an 85% chance to win.” It also reckoned chances were the Democrats would take the Senate.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer could have done better.

A number of other analysts did do better. Such as R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., editor of The American Spectator, who told me in June that Trump was going to win in the Electoral College with more than 300 electoral votes.

One could say that Tyrrell has always been a bit of an outlier. That’s the phrase — “a bit of an outlier” — with which FiveThirtyEight’s writer mocks 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, because she was still wondering about Santa after age 7.

I’m not joking. Nate Silver’s senior science writer, Maggie Koerth-Baker, quotes a study published in 1896 that found the “mean age of loss of belief in Santa was 6.35 years.” Since then, the age of loss of belief has crept slightly upward.

“There’s a lot we still don’t know,” reports Ms. Koerth-Baker, “about what makes humans likely to believe in things that don’t exist.” Like what — the virtues of high taxes, ObamaCare and the United Nations?

The Sun wrote to Virginia about what it called the “unseen world” — and it wasn’t referring to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin (no matter how blind the newspa- pers were to the Rust Belt).

There is, the Sun replied to Virginia, a “veil” that “not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see.”

“Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.”

That’s an idea on which even our Torah sages have enthused to the Sun.

What a gift of wisdom for this Christmas season, in a year when the political world has been turned upside down by — among others — those who have clung to their bibles and their faith. And, yes, Virginia, to the truth of American greatness.

Five Thirty Eight’ s writer mocks 8- yearold Virginia O’ Han lon, because she was ’ still wondering about Santa after age 7.