Crossposted from Blue Arkansas
The Washington Post has a story up by Chris Cillizza about the Arkansas U.S. Senate Democratic primary election. The story is full of spin for Blanche Lincoln. Now, here is the deal. This is a "reporter" who is supposedly unbiased and doesn't have a horse in the race. This story makes a larger point about media, political affiliation, and bias. Although, that is not what the story was trying to do. Let's go through this one step at a time:
Washington Post - Chris Cillizza
When Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter announced on March 1 that he would enter the Democratic primary against Sen. Blanche Lincoln, many political observers viewed it as the beginning of the end for the incumbent.
Instead, the announcement may have marked the start of her political comeback.
Cillizza states that the primary race "may have" marked the start of a political comeback. Comeback? Where did he get that from? What evidence is there for such a "comeback?" I certainly haven't heard anything about a "comeback" around here. Let's look at his "evidence."
Three days after Halter made it official, however, Lincoln launched television ads touting her Senate seniority (she is the first Arkansan to chair the Agriculture Committee) and casting herself as an independent. One ad included a defiant message for the left, which had begun pouring money into Halter's campaign: "I don't answer to my party," she said. "I answer to Arkansas."
Suddenly, Lincoln was relevant again...
What?! Her "comeback" is evident in the fact that she ran some political ads on television? That has got to be one of the worst supported suppositions I have ever seen from a national reporter.
...And, polling suggests that despite Halter's eye-popping fundraising and a slew of national labor groups spending money to bash her, Lincoln is holding steady in advance of the May 18 primary.
- So now a "comeback" is defined by not having dropped any further in a single poll since three weeks ago.
- Hey, look at the fundraising numbers again. Lincoln has way outspent and has much more cash on hand than Halter.
- And on the "national labor groups spending money to bash her." Take a look at the word selection. He uses the word "bash," not criticize or attack even. That right there is a bias against the union's and a pro-Lincoln statement. The word "bash" denotes "attack" in the dictionary. However, in political context, it often connotes that such attacks are incorrect, overly harsh, or unimportant.
- He conveniently leaves out all the negative campaigning that Lincoln herself has been running against Halter. Which, I believe, has been much worse and persistently misleading than most of the ads against Lincoln.
Now this one is a real big pile of spin...
(Halter's campaign spent the latter part of last week touting an automated poll that showed him within seven points, but the firm that conducted the survey is little known, and other private, i.e. unreleased, data suggest the margin is far closer to the Kos figures.)
- He associates the Talk Business poll showing Bill Halter behind by 7% and Blanche Lincoln in the 30's with the Halter campaign and not Talk Business. I think this is a deliberate way to falsely suggest that it was Bill Halter's campaign that conducted the poll.
- He then slights the poll without giving a reason beyond the fact that it was done by a small firm.
- He then sites an unsourced and unverifiable piece of qualitative information to deride the poll further. Did the Lincoln campaign supply him with their internal poll? Is that the "private, i.e. unreleased, data" that he is talking about here? Probably.
- If #3 is true, then that means he basically associated a non-campaign poll with a campaign and used an internal poll without saying it was such.
The top 2/3 of the article was practically written by the Blanche Lincoln campaign. Cillizza just put his name on it.