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Role of the Media

Wakeforest22890 said:
Conservatives don't care enough about statistics to see that national polling wasn't really wrong. They just see polls had Clinton ahead entering Election Day and Donald winning as a sign that the polls were wrong and the media that used those polls was using fake news. Of course the polls were on the popular vote, which Hillary did in fact win, and the issues with polling were really limited to a small number of Midwestern states.

You live, you learn.
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"If you take away that middle 13 minutes where the other team went on the 40-14 run, it's a two possession game." [Redacted]
 
jhmd2000 said:
"If you take away that middle 13 minutes where the other team went on the 40-14 run, it's a two possession game." [Redacted]
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How many times do we have to have the discussion that the polls were pretty accurate?
 
Polls have very little to do with it. Conservatives have thought (with varying degrees of merit) that "The Media" was biased against them. This thought process has been around since at least the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. No matter what fight conservatives (social conservatives especially) have chosen to fight, whether it be opposing integration, women's rights, marriage equality, or abortion, the feeling has been that Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings, or the editorial boards of the NYT, WaPo, and others were against them.

To a point, conservatives were right about that point. Coverage of those issues (and issues such as transgender rights today) in traditional media sources has generally favored the progressive side of the argument. Of course, when your argument is that black kids don't deserve to go to school with white kids, it might be difficult to establish "fair" coverage of that position. But there is plenty of room for disagreement on many other social issues, and conservatives are correct in asserting that traditional media has sometimes failed to find voices to appropriately advocate the conservative position on those issues.

Where the conservatives are way the fuck off is the idea that "The Media" somehow is biased in favor of democrats or certain democratic candidates. Traditional media sources broke Watergate, savaged President Carter for the "lust in my heart" quote, broke Iran-Contra, discovered Gary Hart's cheating during the '88 democratic primary, extensively covered Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, and Monica Lewinsky, covered the WMD debate prior to and after the decision to go into Iraq, and broke the Clinton private server. The idea that any traditional media is sitting on a story that would increase reader/viewership/clicks because they have a favorite candidate is stupid.

FoxNews came about in the mid-90s with the idea that there was an audience in US, like the ones that had existed in Europe for decades before, of people who wanted to hear news with a consistent slant, no matter the story. It was right. To the extent that FoxNews gave a platform to conservative voices who had otherwise been denied an audience (a point I will leave for others to debate)- great. To the extent that FoxNews allowed conservatives to hear news coverage that wasn't critical of their views on various social issues- more power to them. But FoxNews also took the step of asserting that all other media coverage was bullshit- that because FoxNews was willing to be a cheerleader for the right, that everyone else mustbe a cheerleader for the left. This was, of course, bullshit. But it was, and is, bullshit that even fairly smart conservatives are willing to eat up, as demonstrated by jh's posts on this thread.

When you take FoxNews' cynical view of journalism, and combine it with the over-saturation of news media in general, it lead to a world where people (1) are willing to believe that nobody is actually trying to do a good job of covering the news (a conclusion that should generally be reserved for utter morons like thereff or simos); (2) any fact that doesn't fit into your predetermined world view must be false; and (3) any negative coverage of your political team must be #fakenews or #bias. Which is sad.

Let's be clear. This country is much better off with freedom of the press. This country is much better off when journalists have unfettered access to elected representatives and those the representatives choose to install to help operate the government. The fact that some of the purported conservatives around here have not immediately condemned the actions of Spicer on Friday is fucking insane. And no amount of "Clinton News Network" or "The Media was in President Obama's pocket" nonsense will cover that up.

Stop pulling for an ideological team and come up with a core set of principles. Freedom of the press (and the ability to consume multiple sources of media on the same issue to try and determine the truth) should be one of them.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
Agreed that was "an" issue. I think polls did a poor job identifying the makeup of the electorate in the rural areas of midwestern states. Turnout from those areas was higher than projected and speaks to Donald's appeal to agriculture/blue collar folks in the Midwest. It will be interesting to see how their support changes, if at all, based on what happens with plants and manufacturing jobs in these areas over the next four years. I don't expect there to be much of a difference in 2018/2019 as compared to now because quite frankly these manufacturing jobs aren't coming back to America.
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Common man let's not do mental gymnastics to try to pretend like the polls weren't wrong. They were wrong in MI, Ohio, PA, FL, NC, VA, GA, WI... Pretty much every single swing state they were wrong. So wrong in fact they played a big role in why Hillary lost because her team wasn't campaigning to what the reality actually was.
 
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You're partially right but overstate your case which is why I don't think your general point about my post "requires mental gymnastics" carries much water at all. Here's the polling breakdown of the states you mentioned:

Missed by more than the margin of error in:

Wisconsin (badly)
Michigan (within .5 of MOE)
Ohio (within .5 of MOE)

Also really badly missed on Iowa (not included in your states). Polls also missed by roughly three percent in favor of Clinton on Minnesota but she still won the state. So that's five Midwestern states where the polling missed. That's about it for where polling was drastically off.

Was within the margin of error on:

North Carolina
Pennsylvania

Nailed it (within one percentage point) on:

Florida
Virginia
Georgia

Also nailed it in New Hampshire, Arizona, Maine, and Colorado

Other states where polling was off by 3 or more points (Nevada/New Mexico) both were wrong in favor of Donald and swung three points for Clinton from what polling showed.

To PH's point about the late impact of the Comey letter, those who hadn't made their mind up within two weeks of the Election broke hard for Donald. That may be for reasons other than the Comey letter or other reasons in conjunction with the Comey letter but the polls were much closer on people who had already voted prior to the Comey letter in these states.

Which brings me back to the point I initially made which was polls did a poor job identifying the makeup of the electorate in the rural areas of midwestern states and that the Comey letter was "an" issue. The states they missed on badly at the state level were midwestern states.
 
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Clinton was projected to win the popular vote by 3.2% on the final RCP aggregate average. She won the popular vote by 2.1%, well within the margin of error.

I think liberals are going to insist too much that there was NOTHING wrong with polling while conservatives are going to insist that polls completely whiffed. Neither of these is entirely true, but to say polling was off because Donald won the election doesn't make too much sense as a blanket statement. And pointing to a state like Florida, Georgia, or Virginia to say that polling was off when the polls were almost exactly right just undermines any argument that you're looking to advance about polling.
 
Trump is not a racist or a fascist, really. He is a man who very desperately wants to be liked and adored, especially by the creme de la creme, and that is his whole bag. He is an ignorant old man, whatever he learned in college he has not maintained or updated through reading and general interest in history, civics, etc. He is a putz, and his only 'friends' are sycophants and whores.

That being said, he is surrounded by men who prop him up to get theirs. He may or may not be fully cognizant of this, he is foolish desperate chump. Some of them may be racists and fascists, I don't know.
 
WakeandBake said:
Trump is not a racist or a fascist, really. He is a man who very desperately wants to be liked and adored, especially by the creme de la creme, and that is his whole bag. He is an ignorant old man, whatever he learned in college he has not maintained or updated through reading and general interest in history, civics, etc. He is a putz, and his only 'friends' are sycophants and whores.

That being said, he is surrounded by men who prop him up to get theirs. He may or may not be fully cognizant of this, he is foolish desperate chump. Some of them may be racists and fascists, I don't know.
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Just because he doesn't intentionally come off as a fascist, or know what that would look doesn't mean that he doesn't naturally have fascist tendencies (which he absolutely does).
 
WFcatamount22 said:
Common man let's not do mental gymnastics to try to pretend like the polls weren't wrong. They were wrong in MI, Ohio, PA, FL, NC, VA, GA, WI... Pretty much every single swing state they were wrong. So wrong in fact they played a big role in why Hillary lost because her team wasn't campaigning to what the reality actually was.
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The polls weren't necessarily wrong. Hillary's interpretation of the polls was wrong because her people didn't account for margin of error. She choose to believe the more optimistic side of the margin and extend the lead instead of being more pessimistic and protecting her lead.

And again, polling stopped a few days before Election Day. Trump was building momentum. Look back at the polls over time. They show a continuous ebb and flow in which Hillary got a big lead and then the numbers would converge. Stop the polls before any of those convergence points and Hillary's lead would look big and safe. Keep doing and the race got tighter. Well that's what happened. The polling stopped before the numbers converged.
 
They also weren't even wrong in "pretty much every single swing state," they were off-base in a specific region of the country. That, to me, tells more about the issues with polling in that area than with polling in general.
 
PhDeac said:
The polls did reflect what was happening. They showed Trump rapidly closing the gap post-Comey. Polls couldn't take into account Trump's momentum from Sunday to Election Day.
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You missed the major point in that the media did not want to see that Trump was catching up. The Investors Business Daily poll had Trump pulling even and even winning some a few weeks earlier as did the LA Times poll. It also happened in 2014 when the national media kept hoping for a Dem win in the Senate even though most polls showed at least a 51-49 Repub win [ended up with 54 I believe]. 538 Nate Silver was the worst then and was the worst in 2016, holding on to his polling, but at least Larry Sabato admitted he screwed the pooch.

Trump started catching a lot of traction way back in the summer when Brexit started showing people were tired of the same old crap. A lot of us could see it and I was in Europe right before that happened and they were saying on our cruise ship it was going to happen [the media here said no way!]. All fall many of us could see the same movement because people did not trust Hillary, but the liberal media kept trying to force feed her on everybody. All her crap with WikiLeaks just proved everybody right about her. Then her medical condition cover-up reared its ugly head and the media tried to cover it up. Finally a week before the election OBamaCare premiums started coming out and the final straw broke the camel's back!

Comey was the Lib's hero in the summer, but the truth was finally told on Hillary in the fall. Blame it on Comey. Blame it on the Russians. Blame it on WikiLeaks. Hell, blame it on Tommy Elrod & WakiLeaks if you want to Ph, you just had a crappy candidate. Brazile, WaWa & Podesta cheated to help her beat poor old Bernie and they got caught red-handed!

The liberal media had 60 reporters, anchors & executives go to an off-the-record at the homes of top Clinton campaign officials. Now they squawk at letting Trump speak off the record? He overcame Clinton's meddling and whipped her butt anyway.

Journalists used to only cover the story. Now journalists are trying to be the story. They need to stop whining and get back to being unbiased anchors and news people. period. Take their jobs seriously again, quit lobbing insults and opinions and report the facts. Trump has played the media just like he wants them and it has been fun to watch them act like victims.
 
TheReff said:
You missed the major point in that the media did not want to see that Trump was catching up. The Investors Business Daily poll had Trump pulling even and even winning some a few weeks earlier as did the LA Times poll. It also happened in 2014 when the national media kept hoping for a Dem win in the Senate even though most polls showed at least a 51-49 Repub win [ended up with 54 I believe]. 538 Nate Silver was the worst then and was the worst in 2016, holding on to his polling, but at least Larry Sabato admitted he screwed the pooch.
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538 just uses aggregate poll data to create a probablistic outcome for each state, as far as I know they don't run their own polling. Also any poll that had Donald winning the popular vote was automatically off by at least 2.1%. Any poll that had Donald winning by more than a point was outside the margin of error for the actual outcome.

I don't even see Investors Business Daily as a poll period on the 538 ratings so I can't comment on the validity of that poll.
 
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TheReff said:
You missed the major point in that the media did not want to see that Trump was catching up. The Investors Business Daily poll had Trump pulling even and even winning some a few weeks earlier as did the LA Times poll. It also happened in 2014 when the national media kept hoping for a Dem win in the Senate even though most polls showed at least a 51-49 Repub win [ended up with 54 I believe]. 538 Nate Silver was the worst then and was the worst in 2016, holding on to his polling, but at least Larry Sabato admitted he screwed the pooch.

Trump started catching a lot of traction way back in the summer when Brexit started showing people were tired of the same old crap. A lot of us could see it and I was in Europe right before that happened and they were saying on our cruise ship it was going to happen [the media here said no way!]. All fall many of us could see the same movement because people did not trust Hillary, but the liberal media kept trying to force feed her on everybody. All her crap with WikiLeaks just proved everybody right about her. Then her medical condition cover-up reared its ugly head and the media tried to cover it up. Finally a week before the election OBamaCare premiums started coming out and the final straw broke the camel's back!

Comey was the Lib's hero in the summer, but the truth was finally told on Hillary in the fall. Blame it on Comey. Blame it on the Russians. Blame it on WikiLeaks. Hell, blame it on Tommy Elrod & WakiLeaks if you want to Ph, you just had a crappy candidate. Brazile, WaWa & Podesta cheated to help her beat poor old Bernie and they got caught red-handed!

The liberal media had 60 reporters, anchors & executives go to an off-the-record at the homes of top Clinton campaign officials. Now they squawk at letting Trump speak off the record? He overcame Clinton's meddling and whipped her butt anyway.

Journalists used to only cover the story. Now journalists are trying to be the story. They need to stop whining and get back to being unbiased anchors and news people. period. Take their jobs seriously again, quit lobbing insults and opinions and report the facts. Trump has played the media just like he wants them and it has been fun to watch them act like victims.
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TLDR; they were saying on our cruise ship it was gonna happen!
 
That post just shows a complete and utter misunderstanding of what 538 does. I'm not even going to get into the hot takes on the media.
 
Sometimes it's just funny to think that we have a college sports board poster called TheReff who is wrong almost 100% of the time.
 
Time for my semi-annual statement that people who are too dumb to get it, are too dumb to get that they don't get it.
 
The White House’s Politico slime job, from start to finish

What? A Politico reporter laughed about the death of a Navy SEAL who died serving his country, in a talk with a White House official who also happens to be U.S. Navy Reserve commander? Politico spokesman Brad Dayspring stated that this claim was a “patently false characterization” of the exchange; far from laughing about a SEAL’s death, Isenstadt was reacting merely to the vehemence with which Spicer was disputing his reporting.

Dayspring confirms that Spicer leveled this SEAL-related accusation in the call itself. That wasn’t all: The press secretary also spoke in that call of the possibility of pitching that story to another outlet, the better to unmask Isenstadt’s alleged ridiculing of a dead Navy SEAL. Isenstadt explained he had done no such thing.

Isenstadt and Spicer traded emails about the story on Sunday, when the story was published. Again Spicer brought up the laughter allegation and pledged to Isenstadt that he “will be sure to get that out.” Not long after, Bedard was in Isenstadt’s email citing White House “insiders” who’d entrusted him with a “nugget.”
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