{"id":30834,"date":"2012-10-02T12:10:47","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T17:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=30834"},"modified":"2013-02-25T16:48:12","modified_gmt":"2013-02-25T22:48:12","slug":"a-small-victory-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=30834","title":{"rendered":"A Small Victory"},"content":{"rendered":"

This blog doesn’t really have a mission, per se. \u00a0For ten and a half years now, it’s been more or less my stream of consciousness, mostly but by no means all political.<\/p>\n

But if I\u00a0had\u00a0to pick a mission, it’d most likely be “convince people to verify the media on\u00a0everything<\/em>. \u00a0I shrink from saying “distrust the media” in as many words, but I’m somewhere close to that.<\/p>\n

And it’s just a little gratifying to see the American people are starting to get that message, at least in re this year’s presidential polling<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u00a0A plurality of Americans and more than seven in 10 Republicans say pollsters are intentionally skewing results to benefit President Obama, according to a new poll released Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Some 42 percent of voters surveyed by Daily Kos and SEIU believe pollsters were manipulating their sample sizes to benefit the incumbent president, while 40 percent do not. An additional 18 percent said they were not sure. That’s evidence that Republican claims that Democrats and minority voters are being oversampled in national polls could be resonating \u2014 and potentially undermining the momentum of the president’s early lead.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m not saying there aren’t journalists, and even organizations, that try to do a good, detached (not “objective” – that’s a myth), fair and clear job of reporting the news.<\/p>\n

I am saying that at the highest levels in this extremely hierarchical industry, the publishers and editors and executive producers for the major newspapers, broadcasts, cablecasts and public media, the adage “power corrupts” is as true as anywhere else. \u00a0There is power in the mainstream media – and for many in the higher ranks of the business, the urge to use that power to make sure American politics redounds to their advantage has\u00a0got\u00a0<\/em>to be\u00a0irresistible.<\/p>\n

And I’m suggesting that this year’s polls, and the ever-more-leftward revealed bent of the media’s “fact check” industry, is evidence that they’re resisting the urge less and less.<\/p>\n

And, maybe, people are starting to realize this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This blog doesn’t really have a mission, per se. \u00a0For ten and a half years now, it’s been more or less my stream of consciousness, mostly but by no means all political. But if I\u00a0had\u00a0to pick a mission, it’d most likely be “convince people to verify the media on\u00a0everything. \u00a0I shrink from saying “distrust the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-center-right-altmedia","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30834"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30836,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30834\/revisions\/30836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}