November 04, 2004There's a giant ball of idiocy floating around this week about exit polls and weblogs; as Glenn Reynolds calls it, the big-media spin:
· Blog amateurs show why big media look askance at them.
· How did exit polls start avalanche of inaccuracy?
· Bloggers Botch Election Call: a piece so bad it should never have made it to print.
· Even my pal Jason asks: Is this the opposite of blogging's self-stated role in fact checking the media? Blogger, fact check thyself.
· More twaddle: Too Much Buzz on the Blogs.
· Fallacy central: Bloggers' Dilemma: Speed vs. accuracy.
· And CJR thinks internet readers are emotionally-driven dunderheads.
1. TV news people were not pressured by webloggers posting exit polls: they already had that same data. They commissioned that data. In fact, the opposite is way more likely to be true. Like "the real media" doesn't send tips and data to weblogs every day? As Jack Shafer points out, "journalists live to blab," and you bet they do -- you'd maybe even be surprised by the names that show up in our inboxes.
2. At every opportunity, most bloggers made disclaimers about the meaningless ness (or, at least, the unknown meaning) of the numbers found in exit polls. (Drudge didn't, as I recall.) Many linked to explanations and debunkings, such as the ones by Mystery Pollster. At no time did any weblog that I read make a "call" for Kerry based on these numbers. The numbers were described as being very favorable to Kerry, which they were -- and then were usually disclaimed.
[Update: Ha ha, Nick Denton has a blog? No, but seriously: Nick Denton's personal site isn't Instapundit, Atrios, Talking Points, etc. I do think there's a difference between "personal" sites and those who are pundits/news-like/gossip sites. In other words: it wasn't a source that I, or, I think, a lot of other people, turned to for election information. I clearly wasn't reading it.]
3. Exit polls are a big industry, paid for by big media. The anchors bouncing around Democracy Plaza and whatever the hell Fox News called their HQ (Bush's Bathroom?) all had these numbers and they were working from them; so did the talking heads, the pundits, hell, even the camerapeople. And they choose not to tell you. Why shouldn't you have them?
4. More from Mystery Pollster: "Very serious reporters from very serious media outlets jumped to the conclusion that Kerry was running the table, just like all those 'unsophisticated' bloggers." And it wasn't just reporters: it was campaign managers and staffers, strategists -- and even candidates, as far as I understand.
5. Were the poll numbers bad? Quite possibly, for any number of reasons. As a tipster wrote to Slate blogger Mickey Kaus:
[T]he VNS [leadership] from 2000 (disaster) and 2002 (complete collapse of VNS) must be overjoyed with the utterly dreadful performance of the much ballyhooed National Election Pool [which conducted the 2004 exit polls]. They f*** up the national poll, countless state polls (Virginia is a toss-up, I don't think so!) and God knows what else.
So: No bloggers were "taken in" any more than anyone else. No bloggers spread false information. Bloggers -- and Slate -- did exactly what their role is in the media: they gave you an insight into what was going on behind the news, and on how the newsmakers were making the news.
Should bloggers fact-check exit polls? Uh, how? Nobody else does. As Jeff Jarvis points out, it's impossible. Perhaps against the live incoming vote numbers, which were also available on the internet, and were, really, just about as informative, given that those numbers are only useful if you know which precincts in particular are being reported. (As in: Florida Panhandle numbers may look really different from Miami-Dade numbers.)
Anyway: there were some good pieces on this here and there, but overall, this is a giant, illogical, annoying canard, and frankly, I'm stunned to see so much bad thinking making it to print -- particularly on the web, where, after all, people should know better.
