Some of the people, some of the time

The most frightening thing about the United States is the pride with we carry our abject ignorance and stupidity. There's almost a pride in indulging in the most brainless TV series, in wallowing in the most ludicrous myths, in holding dear our favorite superstitions.

Ben Smith at Politico gives some scientific grounding to the W.C. Field's line that "there's a sucker born every minute." And allows us to hope that the sasquatch factor found in polls will not prevent the best person from being elected president.

Go here, for The Amazing Bigfoot Diet, a Mojo Nixon song which scorns the sensational press, and America's gullibility.

The weather in November

The Hartford Courant is at it again. Front page banner headline above the fold:

McCain-Clinton a Tossup.

Two things wrong with this article.

After editorially excoriating media who used polls as news in New Hampshire, and getting it fiercely wrong, The Hartford Courant once again presents polls as news, polls as fact. This headline will sit on coffee tables, and in honor boxes across the state all day long, creating an impression that is wrong and speculative. They may as well be trying to predict the weather on election day in November.

Another thing, the headline reveals a secondary facet of the story. The real story is that if Barack Obama is the candidate, which evermore so, it appears he will be, then, according to the polls, he is predicted to beat McCain by a whopping 17 points.

Shame on the Courant for once again misusing polls as news. If I never hear "Quinnipiac" for the next seven months, it will be too soon.

NOTE: Had the gall bladder removed today, so liklihood of additional posts is slim.

The problems with reporting polls as news

Is that lately, they have frequently been wrong.

Karen Hunter, reader representative at the Hartford Courant, examine that fact today in her column.

Interestingly, she concentrated on a UCONN poll managed by Monika McDermott, which turned out to be spectacularly wrong in it's projections. Apparently, defensively, McDermott explained how the poll could have gotten it so wrong, but she blamed the media for misrepresenting the facts of the poll by concentrating on two question, which, she says "sell newspapers"

I'm afraid no one today knows what sells newspapers, or more of them would be sold. McDermott is partially right. Newspapers and other media like to concentrate on the simple facts of a horse race, and abandon the complexities of a campaign. The media likes to sell poll results as facts, but unfortunately, polling companies market the most sensational elements of the polls they conduct.

In fact, McDermott herself was on the Colin McEnroe show making projections, based on her poll, that were more in the realm of opinion then they were anchored in any kind of fact.

The two big problems are that pollsters are trying to make money by predicting how an entire population feels, or will act, based on a small sample (and it's now clear that they can be wrong well beyond their predicted percentages). And the pollsters themselves get a little starry-eyed when being interviewed as if they were some sort of seers. For their part, the news organizations have treated poll results as if they were actual facts, instead of what they really are, guesses.

In a perfect world, pollsters would retire to the back rooms of phone banks, computers and statistics, and news organizations would print poll results on page 29, for what they are, pretty good hunches about what might happen.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

I was listening to Colin McEnroe and Teresa Pelham on Colin's drive time show on WTIC-AM last night on the way home, and I heard a UCONN pollster talking about a recent poll. At some point, the pollster seemed to diverge from poll results and move toward some conclusions which didn't seem to be a part of the polls. To be fair, Colin kept returning to the topic of "poll results" and his guest, Teresa Pelham continued to question the methods and validity of the poll. Anyway, I called in and chatted with Colin, and then wrote this in an email to him today:

I called in at the end of you show yesterday to complain about polls, but not exactly to complain about the polls themselves, but about how the media talks about them.

Agreed that polls aren't going away, but maybe responsible journalists and media outlets can begin to write and speak about polls for what they are - mere projections of what may happen, and not absolute facts about the future.

How many times have you seen a headline, or a news anchor proclaim something like: Lead Swells for Obama. And that "fact" comes two weeks ahead of an actual primary. We've seen how polls can be very wrong. And wrong or right, what effect do they have on the elections?

Sure enough, yesterday you talked about the UCONN poll as a poll, and were pretty careful throughout to mention that the conversation was about a poll, but as the conversation went on, your guest talked less about projections, based on the polls, and more about the treating her poll's results, or assumptions made as a result of that poll, as facts.

Based on a sample of 400 in each party, Monika McDermott was making blanket statements: about McCain, she said "he's not seen as conservative," and about Obama, "he's a firecracker that (sic) really inspires people, and he excites them." Both of those statements sound like opinion to me, and I wonder if a statistician ought to be sprinkling those kind of opinions into a conversation about poll results.

I think polls skew voting, and I think some in the media treat polls as fact, particularly when they write headlines, or create graphic grabs on TV.

I know polling and writing about polls are protected by the Constitution, but maybe responsible members of the media could post a disclaimer in every story, every conversation about polls that would be similar to the warning on a pack of cigarettes: This story/conversation is based on a poll, and as such is merely a projection of what might happen in a real election/caucus.

Personally, I think polls are a way for media outlets to create news that they think will get them more readers and viewers. It's become another big business, and like weather reporting, it's designed to grab eyes and ears.

Short memory at the Courant

On January 10th, the Courant published an editorial which criticized the role and effect of polls in the electoral process, saying:

Poll-watching and premature analysis tend to reduce this quadrennial exercise in self-determination to the level of a sports contest.

Today, at the top of the front page, in bold headlines, the Courant declares the favorites in the upcoming presidential primary, declaring:

Connecticut Favorites - Choices are Clear, For Now.

I guess that "for now" absolves them from using polls as predictive news, but they have shamefully ignored the advice their editors offered a week ago. Keep a record of the poll numbers and we'll see just how wrong the Courant is a few weeks from now, and whether they'll offer an apology for misleading readers. Of course, if they end up being correct, they can be accused of affecting the outcome.

So, just as editors advised, it's safer not to emphasize polls, which have proven so unreliable in the past.

Crocodile tears vs. compromised code

The topics of Hillary Clinton's "upset" victory in New Hampshire, and the polls which predicted it wrong, were the focus of much discussion on the 24 hour news cycle blabfest talks shows. From my perspective, the arguments fell into three categories, in which specious reasoning resonated.

1. The polls, right or wrong. The press, and the punditry in particular, jumped all over the "inaccurate polls." If we assume that the polls simply got it wrong, then we have to acknowledge that all the polling companies got it wrong at the same time, and in the same way. Each of the companies predicted correct outcomes for candidates, with the exception of the number of votes Hillary Clinton would receive. If there was aberrant, unpredictable behavior in New Hampshire voting, then none of the polling firms recognized it. In some ways, a true aberration would likely escape the attention of all polling firms in the same way. That has sent the journalists scurrying for explanations as to what the aberrant voting behavior was, who those voters were, and what motivated them. Questions likely never to be answered. However, very few journalists have even raised the issue that maybe the pre-election polls, and notoriously accurate exit polls, may have been correct. Even after voting malfeasance has been demonstrated in the last Presidential election in Ohio, where the last occurence of "incorrect exit polls" became news, even after a recent major article in the New York Times Magazine cast doubt on the accuracy of electronic voting machines, even after it's been proven that Diebold machines (the machines used in New Hampshire) are easily hacked, even as new questions surface about LHS Associates, the company which programs New Hampshire (and all Connecticut) electronic voting machines, even after Republican election workers in New Hampshire have been indicted for phone jamming, journalists are loathe to consider even the possibility of voting machine error or fraud.

2. The mysterious reasons for Hillary Clinton's last-minute surge. Everyone including Hillary was surprised at her victory in New Hampshire. Why? Because polls predicted she would run a distant second. So the punditry has been tied in knots trying to figure out what happened. Here are the theories I've heard.

- Clinton cried on camera. Assumption: voters finally discovered Clinton's "human side."
- Clinton talked for two days about the economy. Assumption: it's the economy stupid.
- Bill Clinton scolded Barack Obama. Assumption: Voters realized Obama is not such a nice fellow.
- New Hampshire voters decided to prove the press wrong. Assumption: People from the land of "live free or die" were not about to allow the press to anoint Obama as the presumed candidate.

All of these explanations can be lumped into the "grasping at straws" category from a press drowning in its own humiliation at getting it wrong (Karl Rove thinks they're right). Still, there's one more unlikely explanation, as implausible as these, but actually better able to be proven than any of the above: someone messed with the voting machines.

Yet this explanation - voter machine fraud - was either not even considered, or scoffed at by pundits, including our hero Keith Olbermann (his shrugging dismissal of this alternative explanation is at the end of this segment):



3. Horoscope or journalism. There's a longstanding question as to whether polls should be treated as "news." They certainly aren't fact, but projections, and even the polling firms will tell you that. Newspapers, new shows, and particularly pundits treat polls as if they are gospel truth. In doing so, some think that news reporters actually shape the news by affecting the outcome of elections. Newspapers might as well print, as fact, the horoscope on the front page - or the weather predictions for a month in the future - as they do campaign polls.

These same news outlets have been quick to jump on the polls as being "wrong," but I haven't found a headline yet that reads: We Were Wrong. Much easier to place blame on someone else.

It's what The Hartford Courant did this morning in an editorial scolding the pundits and pollsters. This from a newspaper who as late as Tuesday morning January 8, featured a front page headline that read: Clinton on Shaky Ground As Obama Surges Ahead, as if it were fact, and not a reflection of polling (a projection, a prediction, a guess).

The press have been wrong so often in the last eight years that they should be ashamed to point a finger elsewhere. As Tom Brokaw suggested to Chris Matthews, journalism needs to ignore polls and concentrate on other campaign matters, like a candidate's record, campaign tactics, claims and counterclaims. Seems like there's a better role for journalists to play than to ride on the campaign bus, listening to the same stump speech six or eight times a day, and getting chummy with a candidate (except of course in the case of Hillary Clinton).

Have I jumped to the wrong conclusion

Earlier today I jumped to the conclusion that inaccurate polling methods, and a press corp which is lazy and incurious has given us eight years of bullshitting president, and now, an inaccurate read on the next election.

Now, some have raised the possibility (without any real evidence, mind you), that perhaps, the polling firms were not wrong, and that, like in Ohio in 2004, it's the Diebold voting machines which should be called into question.

In the minds of most Americans, this will fall into the category of crackpot conspiracy theory, but I personally, am done with dismissing these theories out-of-hand, when so much in history has proven these odd tales to be true.

Upset? What upset?

Disclaimer: I am not a Hillary Clinton supporter.

Is the Hillary Clinton "victory" in New Hampshire, the upset, the comeback, the surprise, the shock, the stunning victory that the press is making it out to be, or is it a clear indication how wrong pre-primary polls, pundits, headline writers and "journalists" are?

My guess is the latter. Before Obama's "victory" in Iowa, he was well behind in those pre-primary polls in New Hampshire. Early this week, those polls gave him a huge bounce in poll numbers. Those numbers were a fiction.

Let's not forget that up until Iowa, Clinton was expected to do very well in New Hampshire. Better in fact than she did. How does that make her win a "stunning victory?"

So should the headlines read:

Pre-vote Polls in Primary Dead Wrong

or

Pundits Wipe Egg from Face

or

Obama Surges, But Clinton Squeaks Out Win

or

Journalists Agree, Polls Are Not News

or

McCain Wins, As Expected


The lessons of New Hampshire should be the lessons of the last three Presidential elections:

- The 24-hour news cycle has created a class of TV journalist who has too much time to fill with meaningless blather
- Polls should not be treated as fact, or as news
- Journalists should stick to fact in campaign reporting, and forget opinion
- Most pundits are wrong at least half of the time
- Too much news is not a good thing
- Journalists are not doing a very good job

Here's what Tom Brokaw had to say.

It's not a hearing problem, it's a listening problem

So if anyone tells you there's still a lot of support for this war, just tell them it's Rush, Bill, Michelle, Dick, Sean, Ann Joe, everyone at Fox, and five or six other Americans.

The rest of us, well...