POLLSTERS & PUNDITS: "COMPLETE FREAKIN' IMBECILES"

POLLSTERS & PUNDITS: “COMPLETE FREAKIN’ IMBECILES”
By Dick Meister

The mainstream media have been their usual infallible selves in covering the
presidential primaries. Their failure to successfully predict the outcomes
of particular contests is not the result of poor advance reporting, of
course. It stems, rather, from ”upsets” that no human could possibly have
anticipated -- sometimes “surprising” or even “stunning” upsets.

Consider Hilary Clinton’s victory in the Democrats’ New Hampshire primary,
for example. Like virtually every other media outlet, the Washington Post
had declared she couldn’t win, and when she did, said the Post’s Chris
Cillizza, it marked “one of the most stunning comeback victories in modern
American politics.”

Cillizza’s cop-out also marked one of the more extreme examples of the media
attempting to cover its … well, you know what. But though extreme, it was
not unusual. Happens all the time, as I certainly know after a half-century
of covering politics for a wide variety of print, broadcast and online
outlets.

Voters who caused those journalistically inexplicable “upsets” by failing to
vote as the media told them they would vote weren’t the media’s only
targets of blame. They blamed their errors on pollsters and pundits as well
-- interestingly including some who work directly for them.

As PBS’ Judy Woodruff noted, “Polling shaped most of the news coverage” of
the New Hampshire primaries. Post writer Joel Achenbach described those who
did the polling as “idiots,” and the pundits who also predicted a Clinton
defeat as “complete freakin’ imbeciles. “

Generally ignored, however, are the thousands of political reporters who
also have had much to do with the media failures. They’ve been paying way
too much attention to the know-it-all pollsters and pundits. It’s obvious,
too, that they’ve actually been taking seriously the candidates’ spin
masters, their own speculations and the ever-present conventional wisdom
that points to for-sure winners and losers who often fail to win or lose as
predicted.

Most important, political reporters are spending far too little pre-election
time finding out for themselves how people are likely to vote – and, most
especially, why.

You’d think they were sports reporters, who almost invariably are certain
who’s going to win particular contests, and if they don’t win, damnit, it
has to be an “upset.”

Although the media’s principal claim to political importance -- a reputation
for accuracy --- has suffered mightily, it hasn’t been all bad for them.
The media, particularly the television variety, have been shoveling in their
usual tons of money from those campaign ads that so muddy the political
waters, possibly even more so than the reports about “upsets” and other
figments of media imagination.

There’s also big money to be made after the campaigns are over and the votes
are in. Broadcasters try to draw the maximum, advertiser-loving audiences by
treating the dreary counting of votes already cast as if they were being
cast minute-by-minute in dramatic night-long encounters. It’s as if the
order in which the votes were counted made for a contest, as if they were
runs being scored in a baseball game.

But even more than insulting our intelligence, the post-election reporting
-- and especially the pollster and pundit-heavy pre-election campaign
reporting – warps our perception of the democratic process itself . It
assumes that the media know precisely how we will vote and that, if we don’t
vote that way, we’re “upsetting” something other than poorly prepared
journalists.

Copyright 2008 Dick Meister

Story ID:	3402
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Musings, Essays and Such
Location:	everywhere USA
Year:	2008