No, it’s not about Obama butchering a Reagan quote on government’s role, or another Scalzi post; I’ve concluded the writing of lefty fiction writers should be held only to the standards of fiction, and am swearing off taking their thoughts on the real world seriously enough to criticize, unless they hold elected office.
Speaking of taking oneself too seriously, the formerly major newsweekly recently sold for less than the change in your pocket (word is a second buyer opted instead at the last minute for a McParfait from the Dollar Value Menu) apparently still thinks they’re not just relevant but such a primary, unchallenged source of news that you won’t notice their poll contradicts all the others.
Notice a small outlier here?
This might explain why:
Notes: Data are weighted so that sample demographics match Census Current Population Survey parameters for gender, age, education, race, region, and population density. In addition, data are weighted to correct for different probabilities of selection associated with the number of adults in each respondent’s household and their telephone usage patterns.
As best I can tell, they never disclose what atrocities they actually performed on the hapless raw data to make it look like this. Here’s a lesson for all you poll-watchers out there: always look at the re-weighting… and when a poll mentions that it did re-weighting, but doesn’t give you any quantitative data, there’s a good chance it hides something horrifying.
What’s odd is that Newsweek should know this is a huge outlier to polls done at the same time, and yet they frame it as news, as though they don’t realize people have access to other polls. I expect them to cheerlead for the Dems, but it’s a bit jarring that they seem to be doing so from within their own little Pauline Kael bubble of reality.