Media Criticism

The New Hampshire primary is over and the candidates have dispersed quickly to their various last stands. Mitt Romney has scampered to Michigan, John Edwards has gone back to South Carolina and Bill Richardson is heading home with two fourth place finishes. I think there are a number of lessons that can be learned from the shocking primary results for the Democrats and Republicans.

I think that internal polling and exit polling is becoming a dinosaur in modern politics. There were complaints by polling companies that the criticisms of poll results in favor of Barack Obama were unfair because telephone polls take time. My response is that pollsters need to get ahead of the tech game or go home. I don’t feel bad at all for pollsters since they cause more problems than they solve.

New Hampshire proved that John Edwards is going to be in third place permanently in every state. Hillary Clinton will get institutional support, Barack Obama will get “change� voters and the two will split the rest. I admire the Edwards campaign’s “2 down, 48 to go� mentality but the Democratic base seems to be mobilizing into the Obama and Clinton camps. Edwards will be left with the role of kingmaker since he is just popular enough to carry some delegates in a tight race if he stays in the race through Super Tuesday.

The success of candidates like Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama as well as the resurgence of John McCain has thrown the logic of an accelerated primary schedule on its ear. I am not a Mitt Romney fan but I don’t think Michigan should be his last stand like it appears to be. I think that Rudy Giuliani’s Super Tuesday strategy may pay off in the current atmosphere. Bill Richardson was right to get out of the race but I don’t think anyone on the Republican side outside of Duncan Hunter should budget before February 5th.

This brings me to my last lesson which is that the media needs to stop declaring things over. Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee were given the nominations by CNN, MSNBC and others by the virtue of the Iowa caucuses. I commend Tom Brokaw and Lou Dobbs for pointing out that the media needs to stop declaring the primaries over with 99% of the voters unrepresented. I know that both parties would like a tidy primary season but there is virtue in slugging it out across the country. The parties can find their identities as they head from New Hampshire to South Carolina, Michigan to Nevada, Florida to California.

Anyone who has read past entries on Media Critiques is aware that I dislike the current state of polling and the use of polling by the media. Polling experts claim that the numbers they produce on topics ranging from the latest fashions to the popularity of the president can be extrapolated to the entire population. This type of certainty demonstrates a failure by seemingly intelligent pollsters to recognize that polling is a corollary of marketing and not of academia.

The impetus for my latest rage about polling comes from an article in the Columbia Journalism Review discussing a Zogby poll that claims 52% of Americans would support an attack on Iran. Writer Michael Meyer points out a number of faults with the poll including the use of only two choices to respond to a hypothetical (yes, HYPOTHETICAL) completion of nuclear weapons by Iranians in the near future. Meyer fails to point out that Zogby may be the worst of the worst when it comes to polling due to the poor wording of poll questions. I shouldn’t push Zogby polls forward as the king of bad information as every polling company shares a similar stake in my contempt.

I am not only concerned with the appearance of political support for an Iranian war inherent within the Zogby poll. My concern spreads into the 2008 presidential election where it appears that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination without a problem. The ignorance of Washington elites of what real life Americans outside of polling groups feel about the political scene gives polling its power. Polls are a gauge of the perspectives of a few people that allow politicians and executives to proceed with their own initiatives with the thin veil of public support. Polls, like the Bible, can be interpreted in a number of ways. It is time to stop giving public opinion polls such a large role in our lives and show our support for an issue by picking up a phone, putting pen to paper and screaming out loud to people in the Washington echo chamber.