This blog doesn’t really have a mission, per se. For 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 had to pick a mission, it’d most likely be “convince people to verify the media on everything. I shrink from saying “distrust the media” in as many words, but I’m somewhere close to that.
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 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.
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 — and potentially undermining the momentum of the president’s early lead.
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.
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. There 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 got to be irresistible.
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.
And, maybe, people are starting to realize this.
With the stuff leaking out of D.C. by inside sources regarding the details around the deaths of Ambassador Stevens and the other embassy staff member in Benghazi, I suspect that the stuff is about to hit the fan! The administration allegedly was moving stuff to non government servers and destroying records. When old Swiftee John Kerry gets riled up, you know something’s amiss!
We can add reports today that Lockheed Martin is cooperating with the Regime to avoid notifying their employees of coming layoffs until AFTER the election, a deliberate violation of the WARN Act, then that is just icing on the cake.
I applaud your mission to fact check the media.
Like the fact checkers who had to put a limit on how many facts Michele Bachmann got wrong because there were just too many factually wildly inaccurate statements, and so little time — a pattern she continues — you could spend the rest of your life just correcting the errors on fox news.
Who, surprisingly, are coming up in THEIR own polls, which can hardly be construed as left leaning, with the same numbers as other polls.
And now even the statistically inaccurate web site that was ‘unskewing’ results is putting Obama ahead of Romney.
There are likely more people voting who are self-identified as Democrats than Republicans – it is why your side is trying so very hard to engage in voter suppression. Therefore I’m not at all sure that even if it is correct that slightly more Democrats were asked the poll question than Republicans that it represents an inaccurate picture of voters in the 2012 elections.
There was a recent study done fact checking the fact checkers which found a slightly higher number of Republican statements challenged and checked by fact checkers than Democratic examples. It also found that there were more Republican instances found to be wrong, and that of those that were wrong, more were found to be extremely wrong (like the ‘pants on fire’ degree of wrong at politifact.com).
It has not found however that the fact checkers were inaccurate; rather it appears that there really WERE more errors of fact from the right. That is supported by other sources, however much you dislike the information. Heaven knows, there have been plenty of examples here.
The right wing is full of crazy conspiracy theories; I just wrote about another one today where one of your right wing nut jobs is accusing one of your icons, Grover Norquist of the Tax Plege fame, of being a Muslim trying to subvert the nation to Sharia law. That’s as wacky as Pamela Geller’s claims about Butterball Halal Turkey being a secret plot of stealth Islamization last Thanksgiving (it was inaccurate as well of course).
If the right wing nuts were not so prolifically factually inaccurate, I wouldn’t have nearly as much to write about; glad to hear you are going to be doing some fact checking now. Please DO remember about multi-sourcing, and that someone said that someone said who must remain anonymous doesn’t count for much – like that 103 ballots in Dinkytown story, not even if it comes from a Republican candidate who remains nameless.
Perhaps the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a fact is?
In any case, re the Benghazi story, a happy belated International Blasphemy Day (9/30). I’m sure none of your news sources will be carrying anything on the efforts in Egypt to repeal their blasphemy laws, and to emulate our freedom of speech in a bill of rights. The right doesn’t like the facts of Muslim emerging democracies; it interferes with their Islamophobia.
I suppose it will be a long wait for you to fact check and write about the $3 million paid to the AZ company by the RNC to engage in voter fraud/ voter registration fraud? I suppose like the fraudulent names collected on recall petitions by the GOP groups in WI, that were verified by the WI GAB as NOT being the signatures of actual people, you won’t want to look at those facts either.
tl;DG
Dog Gone said:
“Perhaps the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a fact is?”
Yes, that must be the problem. Please do try to find out what a fact actually is before commenting again.
DG,
a) You condescending on facts is like me condescending on dogs. You are not qualified.
b) If you intend to leave snooty, condescending, novel-length comments, please stay for the discussion. While I can’t imagine enjoying the factual, logical, rhetorical and moral drubbings you get, it’s kinda the right thing to do.
This comment section is not an adjunct to your blog. I don’t do this to your comments section. Why do you do it to mine?
At least they can’t skew the vote results (unless they cheat).
This comment section is not an adjunct to your blog. I don’t do this to your comments section. Why do you do it to mine?
Because bile backs up after a while.
Oh, and by the way, DG;dr.
Because she feels the need to be superior and the fact that her comments on this blog are seen by a lot more people than her and PENisBLOG site could ever hope to get. They’d kill for half your traffic Mitch, and that was not a figure of speech, muhahahaha
DG,
where’s your homework?
to quote DG from her own blog:
“We seem to have had another ‘drive by’ commenting, where someone visits, makes an comment full of unsubstantiated accusations, and then runs away when they can’t provide facts to refute a substantive refutation of their accusations.
Sad. But typical of the reactionary/progressive ideology that puts what they want to believe in place of what is factual.”
seems our prissy st olaf redhead can dish it out but SHE cant take it! What a coward.
Doggy Doo;
You wouldn’t know a fact if it bit you in the butt!
Why don’t you go try to cash a check, make a purchase on a credit for over $300, get on an airplane or pick up a package at any of the carriers without an ID. You left wing moon bats tell more lies in an hour than the entire Conservative world does in 50 years. Perfect examples right here in the Alita Messenger/Dayton family factory of lies to smear the GOP and provide cover for their failure of a husband, father and public servant and AFSCME, the organization that next to the Light Rail debacle, is the biggest Ponzi scheme ever perpetrated on Minnesota citizens.
DG,
Where’s your courage? On your blog you accuse Mitch of suffering from (latest huffpo/DU leg hump phrase) Epistemic Closure. Why don’t you post here and “speak truth to power”?
DG, where’s your homework btw?
Any poll that comes out gets discounted as improper if it does give the desired result. This idea that one party is overpopulated in a poll belies the fact that people are asked to self identify. In 2010, the same argument was made about the number of Republicans in polls. The facts were that each year, self identification reflects the leanings of the public. But how about this. The simple solution. NO POLL SHOULD BE PUBLISHED UNLESS IT IS APPROVED BY THE MAJORITY OF CONSERVATIVE MEDIA. That would seem to solve the problem.
Dave,
Any poll that comes out gets discounted as improper if it does give the desired result.
Wrong again, Dave. It gets discounted as improper if it uses a turnout model that completely beggars the imaginatilon. You really think Democrats are going to turn out in numbers like 2008?
This idea that one party is overpopulated in a poll belies the fact that people are asked to self identify.
It’s a lot more complicated than that, Dave. People self-identify, it’s true. Then the pollster weights the self-identified affiliations to make it resemble what the pollster believes the turnout model will be.
Do you really think Dems are up 13 points in Minnesota? Please elaborate.
In 2010, the same argument was made about the number of Republicans in polls.
Really? Where? By whom?
Because I covered polling very closely in 2010, and I don’t recall this.
The facts were that each year, self identification reflects the leanings of the public
Well, no. That’s the problem. They do not.
The final pre-election polls by the Strib and the HHH in 2010 showed 9 and 12 point Dayton blowouts. The election – you may recall this – was way closer.
The poll did not reflect the leanings of the public. Indeed, in both cases I made exactly the same complaint I’m making today.
Not good enough? Frank Newport, the president of Gallup, made the same exact complaint about Larry Jacobs’ HHH poll.
Is Frank Newport a whiny conservative, Dave?
. But how about this. The simple solution. NO POLL SHOULD BE PUBLISHED UNLESS IT IS APPROVED BY THE MAJORITY OF CONSERVATIVE MEDIA. That would seem to solve the problem.
I’d settle for teaching critical thinking to liberals.
Mitch said SITDs mission was “to convince people to verify . . . .” The mission is not for SITD to be a better fact checker, it’s to convince EVERYONE to be a better fact checker, to create an army of Davids taking on legacy media Goliaths.
It’s sad that Dog Gone has such difficulty with reading comprehension. I blame DFL public employee teachers unions too focused on spending more money “on the children” and not focused enough on teaching basics.
.
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I could teach DG a thing or two about properly dropping a factual turd into blog comments. The key is to stick around and moosh it into the feral muzzles of the moonbat regulars, mock their hilariously dimwitte….
oh, *snap*