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. —Blogs Blamed for Exit Poll Fiasco (Wired | AP)
The headline is a bit incendiary, but the article makes a good point. Any blogger can post a knee-jerk reaction. I speculate that perhaps bloggers who don’t usually read or write about politics dipped their toe into that pool the other day, which means that the production and consumption of political blogging was skewed a little bit more towards newbies.
Thomas Jefferson said that if he had to choose between a nation without newspaeprs or a nation without government, he’d ditch the government and keep the newspapers — but only on the condition that every man receive a newspaper, and that every man know how to read.
I don’t suggest that blogs should or could replace government, but it does take a bit of practice to be able to “read” blogs as pointers towards official and credible information, rather than take every under-supported opinion or unsourced claim as if it were true.
I was at a family gathering recently and one member told that after voting he and his wife were asked by an exit poll taker if they would answer some questions. They both said yes and the question was who they voted for. After answering, this family member glanced at the exit poll taker’s clipboard as he walked past and saw that it had a line down the middle with a B on one side and a K on the other with tick marks under each. He saw the exit poll taker put 2 tick marks on the K side so he said “Hey, you made a mistake, we said we voted for Bush.” At that point the poll taker said “Oh, ah…” and looked flustered.
How did the networks get their exit poll takers?
I feel that the mainstream media are afraid of blogs in some way or another. Not all blogs are inherently inaccurate. Blogs are not the culprit; people are. Anyone can falsify and extrapolate and twist information in any media. Mainstream media are not beyond reproach. I believe a similar thing happened last election; a television station prematurely called the election for Gore. Is that not hypocritical on the media’s part?
It is a major fallacy to generalize anything. Not every person who blogs purposely tries to mislead the public. You made a good point, Dr. Jerz. It is easier to tell if a blog is accurate than a given traditional media. You have easy access to the source of the claims, where you can review its validity. And if there is no source, then one can assume that the person is not completely accurate. The problem is not everyone who criticizes blogs understands them.
On the edge of preposterous, no? It’s interesting that the traditional media blames bloggers. How about them exit polls though? You know – the ones that people can falsely report because there’s no way to confirm the truth until the actual results of the elections are released? Good grief.
Well even if you didn’t create the counter, I guess you’ll remain the one who gets credit unless you change your mind. But thanks for your effort of finding it in the first place.
For the media to blame blogs is ridiculous. If they hadn’t reported the data, there would be no data for bloggers to write about, correct? The problem begins and ends with the media, and they are just hoping somebody willbelieve that the bloggers are to blame so they don’t get called on yet another foul-up.
Blogs can maginfy or at least sort of backlight the oversights and flaws that have always been part of traditional reporting. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, of course, which is why media literacy is so important.