Cheerful thought on home economics

I’m having trouble being optimistic right now.
About anything.
Which probably means I should stop whining now and delete this post.
But if I do that, I will have nothing to say at all.
The problem is that it’s bill paying time, and paying bills always reminds me of death.
But hey, my checks are in the mail! Maybe I should cheer up; I’m probably worth more than the damned gummint.
And I have to say that an analysis by Steve Gill of a disturbing trend in polling has counterintuitively cheered me. Gill shows how a recent Washington Post-ABC poll is “a textbook example of how partisan media outlets manipulate ‘news.’”

A disturbing trend in recent elections has been the intentional use of skewed polling by the media to promote their ideological bent rather than to report the news. We got another dose of this biased effort to twist the news to the liking of the media giants just this week with the latest Washington Post-ABC poll, which “revealed” that Barack Obama has moved to a nine-point lead over John McCain in the presidential race. The mainstream media breathlessly reported this information as indicative of McCain’s loss of campaign steam after the post-convention bounce and the recent euphoria over Sarah Palin.
But what the news outlets failed to report in their coverage about the Washington Post-ABC poll was the fact that 38% of the individuals who made up the poll identified themselves as Democrats, while only 28% identified themselves as Republicans. (See poll question #901.) Not surprisingly, a poll of mostly Democrats revealed that most of them wanted Democrat Barack Obama to be president rather than Republican John McCain. (Last month, the same poll used a 13-point edge for the Democrats among likely voters to produce similar results heading into the conventions.) The heavily skewed partisan nature of the poll is the real story, not the bogus numbers produced as a result of what is essentially a “push poll.”

Now, if I could just figure out how to interpret today’s front page:
DFP_HUGE_0_LEAD.jpg
I can’t help notice that the front page story is authored by “TODD SPANGLER – FREE PRESS WASHINGTON STAFF,” but the pollster is in Iowa, polling Michiganders by phone. It’s all Greek to me, and I can barely remember any of my high school Latin.
It’s like, reconciling the above with the overall average poll results at RealPolitics (which show Obama ahead only by 5.2.% overall) makes paying bills and balancing my checkbook look easy!
Which is a cheerful thought.
So I guess can stop whining now.


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2 responses to “Cheerful thought on home economics”

  1. Godefroi Avatar

    I’ve always hated the Free Press.
    Back in the day, I always relied on the Detroit News for actual news. Of course, that was before they were one entity.
    Whining’s ok once in while!

  2. Assistant Village Idiot Avatar

    Rasmussen. Pew. GWU Battleground (formerly Tarrance). Accept no others.