It has often been said that reading the blogs is like getting the newspaper a few days early. There is a story unfolding before our eyes that will shortly make its way to main stream America in one form or another.
http://howobamagotelected.com/
The above link is a website for a John Ziegler. His contention is that the ONLY reason Obama was elected was due the media influence. (As you can imagine as a person who volunteered over a couple hundred hours I tend to disagree with this statement.) The subtext of his thesis is that Obama supporters are stupid.
Ziegler is working on a documentary to show his point. He has posted a youtube video of several Obama supporters being asked several questions. He then went on to commission a poll by Zogby to prove his point. The first question that comes to mind. Aren't polls supposed to find out information, not to prove information.
As you can imagine the voters in the video and the poll come off looking embarrassingly bad. As you can also imagine their is serious context missing in both. I have formulated my own criticisms of this poll and set out to do this post and have come across a couple of postings that have summarized them as well.
The first problem is that the discrepancy in the , which may not be apparent at first but once it is realized it is pretty obvious. The unflattering questions about McCain and Palin are all events that have occurred in the last 3 months. Meanwhile the questions that Obama supporters got wrong were from 1987 and 1998 and Jan. of this year. Secondly a number of the questions presented as facts about Obama and Biden are questionable interpretations of events. There were a couple of questions that were recent, such as who said they wanted to redistribute the . 81% got that question correct. One can see taht the voters got the questions correct when the event was recent. The voters got the questions wrong when the subject was far removed. Ironically, or not so much, there were no questions about events in the distant past about McCain or Palin such as McCain cheating on his first wife, or being a womanizer, or his involvement with Charles Keating. Likewise there were no questions about Sarah Palin that dated prior to the Republican convention.
Here is a big problem with Ziegler's contention. He presents this information as a fact that the main stream media was so biased toward Obama that it caused him to win. I am not a scientist, nor do I play one on the web. But something seems to be missing in his poll questions. There are no attempts to ascertain where any of the voters received their information about any of the candidates. There is one giant leap of faith taken on his part. There is no way to tie a result (one that is totally invalid to begin with) to a cause.
I have spent the time on this because many on the right began long ago trying to delegitimize this election. Whether it is Obama can't serve because he wasn't born in America, Acorn stole the election, the media was biased, Obama supporters are stupid. Ziegler's efforts are going to be one more attempt to delegitimize the voice of the American people (67 million). Fortunately times have changed there is an aggressive progressive community out there fighting back against empty lies. As a result Zogby has already walked back from their support of this poll. Ziegler has had to spend much time defending this poll.(Although he is getting media attention for his project). I suggest everyone take the time to read the links below. One is a transcript from an interview with Nate Silver of 538.com, one is objective analysis from the Wall Street Journal.
Not this time. That was a common refrain from the stump for President elect Obama and it is a battle cry. We are not going to fall for it, Not this time. We are not going to let myths and half truths carry the day, Not this time. We are not going to be intimidated, Not this time.
http://www.pollster.com/blogs/zogbys_misleading_knowledge_te.php
The Zogby summary quotes Ziegler claiming that "the poll really proves beyond any doubt the stunning level of malpractice on the part of the media in not educating the Obama portion of the voting populace."
The problem, as Silver points out, is that the survey does no such thing.
http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/zogbys-misleading-poll-of-obama-voters-459/
Ziegler agreed that people may have done worst on questions referring to older events. “I think that that’s true, and I think that’s part of the reason there was a disparity there,” he said. “It also goes to the point that the news media ignored the history of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.” When asked why he didn’t include questions referring to unfavorable aspects of McCain’s and Palin’s distant past, he said, “I felt that these were the best 12 for what I was trying to accomplish.”
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/interview-with-john-ziegler-on-zogby.html
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/zogby-engages-in-apparent-push-polling.html
No comments:
Post a Comment