Tuesday night belongs in the US news media Hall of Shame.
It was even worse than CNN's June "Obamacare Repealed!" gaffe. Back then, it was just one network misinterpreting reality, and having a hard time confronting its error for 10 minutes. But now, we've seen the entire network-TV universe mis-interpreting and misrepresenting the state of the most massively polled US Presidential campaign in history, for at least 3 weeks.
Here's a delicious recap:
Going into Election night, everyone except the minority who independently follow and understand the various poll-averaging and poll-based modeling sites (yes, we are still a minority) - everyone else largely believed the MSM line that the popular vote was a "lean-Romney tossup", while the 9 battleground states looked perhaps a tad better for Obama, but were all "too close to call."
Actually, scratch that. Before Election Night, CNN moved North Carolina to 'lean-Romney', leaving the remaining 8 states as 'toss-up'. NBC's Chuck Todd called NC for Romney and Nevada for Obama a couple of weeks earlier.
Tuesday night: cue in Reality, Stage Left.
Wisconsin called for Obama 25 minutes after official poll closing there. NH and (I think) Iowa shortly follow. At 8 PM Pacific a bunch of West Coast electors fall into the Obama columns as the polls close there. 13 minutes later - 11:13 PM Eastern, 8:13 PM Pacific - two networks call Ohio and the Presidency for Obama. Barely an hour and a half later, when he realizes that Obama doesn't even need Ohio anymore, Romney concedes.
Obama ended up sweeping CNN's 'toss-up' states 8-0. Five of them with a margin of 5% or greater. And also winning the popular vote by nearly 3%. "Nail-Biter?" "Toss-Up?" "Too close to Call?"
Of course, the MSM's first line of defense is "Wow? Who Woulda Thunk?" But this is immediately spoiled by the Nate Silvers, whose recent >90% certainty of an Obama win had been laughed out of the newsroom right until Tuesday night. So the MSM now rushes to idolize them, hoping to draw attention away from its own failed-coverage exposed butt.
But even if the MSM had a hard time understanding semi-sophisticated models, simple, TPM-like poll averages would have told them the story. On Election Eve, WI and NV were at O+5, and IA, NH and OH at O+2-3. All five showing larger pro-Obama margins than NC which most of the MSM were willing to call for Romney.
Even giving the media the benefit of doubt and suspense on Ohio, anyone objectively willing to designate NC as 'lean-Romney', should have done the same to WI, NV, IA and NH. In all four Obama had led (on average) throughout the campaign. In all four he had objective advantages on the ground. Were the MSM to do that, the tentative pre-Election-Night electoral tally would have been 263-206 Obama.
Meaning that Obama had to win only one of the four remaining states (OH, CO, VA, FL) in order to win re-election.
This punctures a hole in the second MSM line of defense for its failures, the excuse that "we had to sell an interesting story". Reflecting the reality as it is, the story could have produced headlines such as "Will Obama seal the deal?" or "Will Romney fend off Obama's 4D Chess?", etc. I think viewers would have tuned in with bated breath, just as well as with the false "toss-up" story.
Follow me below the twirl for a somewhat longer discussion of the third - and worst - line of defense: The familiar "he said, she said" or "plausible deniability" excuse.
[Also, many apologies to those who opened the diary to discover that instead of an intro, it has the second part copied twice! I was horrified to discover that and have just re-written the intro from memory.]
The only remaining excuse for the MSM to ignore the writing on the wall, were these outlying polls, sporadically showing Romney leading in Iowa, or in NH, or even tied in WI. Nearly all these polls came from Rasmussen or from the 'baby Rasmussens' - these never-heard-before outfits such as FMWB or Gravis, outfits that came out of the blue (or rather, red) with zero track-record, were paid for by the GOP, and produced eyeball-popping poll results. FMWB's poll showing R+14 in Florida comes to mind. Add to the list McLaughlin, who is well-known (and rather outspoken) as a propaganda hack rather than a serious pollster.
Red flags, anyone? Wouldn't an investigative story about one of these baby Rasmussens, exposing it as a sham or an outright fraud, have been an interesting, worthy media story? Wouldn't a broader scoop showing how the cottage-industry of SuperPAC-funded fake pollsters is trying to shift the narrative, be a major victory for the network airing it? How hard was it to find out who these Baby Rasmussens are?
Not hard at all. In August I called Doug Kaplan, whose personal cellphone appeared in large font on the Gravis poll showing R+4 in Ohio. He answered immediately. We chatted (I'm a statistician). I told him that his strange result is mostly driven by his African American subsample supposedly supporting Obama only 65:35. The 2008 exit poll for this group was 97:2 Obama. Statistically, the Gravis crosstab was beyond implausible, which is why I called Kaplan. No, he himself hadn't noticed.
I don't know whether Gravis was an outright fraud in the literal criminal sense. But from 10 minutes talking with him, it was clear Kaplan and his handful of employees were all totally clueless about polling. He actually offered me, a total stranger, to work with them as a consultant, on the spot! (I politely declined)
But for 2 more months, Gravis, FMWB, McLaughlin and other clowns, were presented in the MSM as legitimate as NBC/Marist, and as more legitimate than PPP. These GOP hacks provided the MSM with its "he said, she said", plausible-deniability cover. Even worse, if there were any polling-related accusations dominating the airwaves recently, they were actually the specious right-wing claims that Silver (who had nailed both 2008 and 2010, and whose predictions were echoed by others) and the community of real professional pollsters were the ones placing their thumbs on the scale, allegedly to show Obama in a better position than he really was.
Have we seen this movie before? In which the main media narrative is a faux "balance", with reality running a distant third to far-right fantasies and corporate-hack lies? And with the latters beating the attack drums, while reality and its defenders are subject to public shaming by the Very Serious People?
Am I kidding you? This is precisely what happened when the MSM helped Bush sell the Iraq invasion. This is also the story of the fabricated "scientific controversy" over Global Warming, between >99% of researchers and a handful of dead-end quacks and industry shills. This is also what had allowed a sitting US President in the 21st Century, brazenly claim that "the jury is still out on Evolution". Not to mention the ridiculous coverage of the Middle East in general and Israel-Palestine in particular, a topic painfully close to my heart. There are countless other examples, of course.
This is the media world we are forced to live in. The sad reality is, that our mainstream news/punditry media is hopelessly biased to the right, to the point of a willingness to sacrifice anything that remains of its professional credibility (Judith Miller, anyone? has anyone learned a lesson?).
But there's a light at the end of the tunnel. The 2012 elections, and the narrative that is gradually taking over in their aftermath, might offer us an explanation for this bias that is more empowering than simple money-powered conspiracy, and is probably more accurate too.
I'm talking about the narrative of "the New Rainbow America". The reality of diversity, that advertisers and entertainment producers have long acknowledged, is now beginning to penetrate the bubble of the Beltway. The GOP woke up Wednesday morning to discover that America's electorate is not composed anymore mostly of prejudiced middle-aged or older white males and their submissive wives (it was heartbreaking to read here these anecdotal stories about swing-state women struggling to gain an independent voice, even as the men in their lives bully them to toe the anti-Obama party line) - with all the rest confined to the fringes, or not voting at all.
No, the American electorate is more diverse and open-minded. But - flipping the camera lens the other way - the mainstream news and opinion shots are still called by exactly the same outdated, misinformed, bubble-dwelling cohort of pompous older white men, with a smattering of other faces thrown in mostly for decoration. This is why they had no problem lapping up and amplifying the tea-party crap since 2009, and why they treated President Obama disrespectully from day one as only half a President (or maybe, two-thirds?). And this is why the MSM executives and pundits can only truly respect the sensitivities of the GOP base, to the exclusion of everyone and everything else, even reality itself: because most of these Beltway bigwigs come from the very same generational, demographic identity group, from the same outdated view and experience of America.
So now the question is: how long will it take to completely puncture this bubble? Or - perhaps better - emulate Obama's realignment of the electoral map, and effectively replace the moribund, expired, bloviating and mansplaining Beltway MSM of older, right-of-center white men catering to an imagined 1950's audience that looks and thinks like them - by a decentralized, diverse coalition of better, alternative, reality-based information outlets such as this site, Occupy-related sites and social media?
The future of the upcoming policy and political battles depends to a large extent upon the answer.