When Egg Is On Your Face, Blame The Bloggers!

Yahoo! News - Bloggers Said to Blame for Bad Poll Info

News organizations promised Wednesday to look into why their Election Day exit polls showed an initial surge for John Kerry, but also blamed bloggers for spreading news that gave a misleading view of the presidential race.

The exit poll data was delivered at several points Tuesday to ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and The Associated Press by the National Election Pool, a company formed in the wake of the networks' blown calls on election night 2000.
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The Florida and Ohio exit poll results, along with those in other states were Kerry was strong, was quickly disseminated on Web sites such as Slate, the Drudge Report, Wonkette.com, Atrios.blogspot.com and Command Post.

Some of these sites cautioned readers not to make too much of the information. The Command Post delivered the news under the headline "Grain of Salt." Drudge removed the numbers almost as quickly as they were posted. And Slate warned: "these early exit poll numbers do not divine the name of the winner."

"I didn't have any real compunction about putting it up there," said Alan Nelson, co-manager of The Command Post. "I didn't struggle with the decision, because I knew it was going to become a global news item within about 30 seconds.

"Our approach is: We post, you decide," Nelson said.

But the people who read these numbers — among them, thousands of ordinary Americans with an intense interest in the election — put too much faith into them and leaped to conclusions, said Bill Schneider, CNN's polling expert.

"I think people believed them, and it's particularly the case with Internet bloggers," said Kathy Frankovic, CBS News' polling director. "That's unfortunate because it sets up expectations that may or may not be met. I think it's a good exercise because it reminded people that early exit polls can be unreliable."

Bloggers picked out different numbers to use for their purposes, said Joseph Lenski, who ran the poll with partner Warren Mitofsky for the NEP. As the day wore on, later waves of exit polling showed the race tightening.

Let me summarize: "we blame the bloggers for the sucky polling data, which we prominently used except when we acted like pussies because we live in fear of repeating 2000. However, many blogs managed to predict the election almost perfectly, take me as an example:
I not only expected Bush to get Ohio and Florida, but I cited either or both New Mexico and Colorado to Bush, and one of the Great Lakes states (Iowa, Wisconsin, ect) to go to Bush, and it looks like Iowa may fulfill this prophecy. Additionally, I cited Zogby's claim that Virginia will be a tiebreaker as an error, correctly called Pennsylvania for Kerry a few times, and was even correct that Ohio would count very slowly (not to mention, end up Bush). My only error was that both New Mexico and Colorado went Bush, but I believe I allowed for this possibility. Perhaps I should have made a prediction for the popular vote, but I am overjoyed with my accuracy nonetheless.
I believe that Fox finally called Florida for Bush after 93% of ballots were counted (if not more), and when Bush led by 5%. That’s not a prediction, it’s a late acknowledgement of a fact. Other networks were slow to agree, and about 99% of Ohio was counted with Bush leading by 2-3% before anyone in the major media even thought about calling it for Bush.

Guess what major media – you suck! Your pundits were wrong, while this little highschool student - sitting at a Pentium 4 without costly statistics and election programs and trying to stream internet radio while updating election results on a 56k modem (one of the two crashes, and both are very slow) – managed to be almost exactly right, and had the backbone to say so when it was relevant.

It’s no surprise that CBS is going after bloggers, while Fox doesn’t seem to be doing so. That’s because CBS has a vendetta (that they may never fulfill, I hope), while Fox actually did some real journalism and investigation.

Overall, however, this entire story is a flimsy attempt at an excuse. The bloggers grabbed polling data from the media or from the same sources as the media, so the Network News has no basis for their complaint, except to whine that bloggers were right while the so-called ‘credible’ networks were wrong. This is little more than an attempt to compete with bloggers, because the TV News has realized that it is unable to keep up, much like newspapers were unable to keep up with live broadcasts. This time, however, the networks should be more up-to-date than bloggers, not to mention more accurate considering they actually have a staff and budget.