After a long (and exhilarating) day and night following the election returns (I got home early from work and set up in my home bunker about 2:00 pm PT, and am just now about to leave my bunker (to get some lectures done for class tomorrow) at 12:47 am PT.
I wound up watching a lot of CBS, CNN and NBC/MSNBC. As suspicious as I was going into this about the quality of the coverage, I thought all 4 of these organizations did a fair to good job, at least compared to my very low expectations. But what really has got me frustrated is how they reported the pre-election polling in the 3 days leading up to the election (probably longer, but I did not really start watching the TV coverage closely until this weekend), and their failure to own up to their embarrassing errors tonight. Polling guru (perhaps after tonight upgraded to Polling God) Nate Silver was the source of a lot of controversy over the last 6 months or so. I happen to have followed his blog very closely for a long time (I even purchased an online subscription to the NYT so I could check it several times a day in recent months). Nate has very consistently predicted about a 2 percentage point win for Obama in the popular vote, a win in 10 of 11 "battleground" states (I include PA and MI here, since the Republican RCP defined them that way), and an Electoral College victory of either 315 or 332 (depending on how you look at it). It is too soon to tell for sure what the popular vote margin will be (a lot of votes in CA and FL and Ohio have still not been counted as of this writing), but I have read estimates that it will be 2-3 points when all is said and done). Nate nailed every single one of the BG states, which also means he correctly predicated all 50 states and the DC, by a more accurate margin than his competitors, and obviously called the winner correctly, getting the EV very close or exactly, and probably getting the popular vote margin very close as well. In the weeks and days running up to the election Republicans and TV Pundits in general dumped all over Nate, calling him either a partisan hack or just a narcissistic media whore. It was said that anyone who says they can tell you who is going to win this election, and by a specific amount, is lying. And I heard about a million times in the 3 days prior to tonight on various TV stations that the election was "too close to call". All of the critics were dead wrong, and Silver was uncannily right - yet with all of my channel surfing tonight I did not see one person acknowledge that, or apologize to him. This illustrates the primary bias of the so-called "mainstream media" - it is clearly not pro Obama, or pro-liberal, since they dumped all over the person who was giving an analysis that happened to be pro-Obama this cycle (he was actually more negative - and again more accurate, about Obama's margins than his competition last cycle, but his partisan critics never seemed to be able to understand that). The bias of course is to create dramatic and entertaining television that will attract more viewers and sell more soap. I am well aware of this bias of course, but I don't recall many more glaring and shameful examples of it, as in this case it caused them to clearly distort and misreport the main story they were supposed to be telling. The election was always close, and certainly it was possible that Romney could have won (Nate gave him about an 8% chance as of last night - the same as trying to fill an inside straight), but any honest and accurate reporting would have started by telling the public that the chances were very high that President Obama would be re-elected. Doing so would have also focused the public on what the main storyline was all night, which was the percent of white voters. Romney's only chance to win was that the state polls (that Nate relies on so much) were underestimating the percentage of white voters in the final vote. Instead of course, the Obama organization (and here the President, in his amazing acceptance speech, got it exactly right when he said that his campaign people were the best in history; nobody has ever organized, managed and strategized a political campaign better than David Pluffe and David Axelrod) got the white vote percentage almost exactly right. This was important not just to predict the outcome, but to understand it - as several pundits eventually did share with the public, the result of this campaign makes clear that if the Republican Party wants to be viable at the national level in the future, it is going to have to figure out a way to appeal more to Blacks, Asians and especially Hispanics (and to women and young adults). The American electorate is getting less white every 2 years - George Bush is no doubt the last candiate who will ever be elected President of the United States by getting 60% of the white vote (the same as Romney tonight) and less than 40% of the non-white vote. From Richard Nixon in 1968 through George Bush in 2004, Republicans were very succesful winning national elections by pandering to the fears and prejudices of white Americans, and scapegoating especially Blacks and Hispanics. That strategy is never ever going to work again, and the sooner the Republican party gets that through their seemingly insane brains, the sooner we will get back to a reasonably functional congress and a reasonably productive two-party system that can disagree about broad values and solutions, but find common ground to solve major problems. By not accurately reporting the election in the weeks leading up to it, TV news organizations made it more difficult to tell this story and set it in its proper context. They may have helped Hillary Clinton (or more likely one of those Texas Hispanic twins) get elected in 2016, but they did not server their viewers, or their country, well. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. 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