November 12, 2004

Mainstream Media Tries to Mislead the Public About Bloggers; MSM Will Lose that Fight

LGF, Prof. Glenn Reynolds, and Bryan Preston, as well as the Wall Street Journal, are tracking efforts by mainstream media to mislead the public about us bloggers.

On election day, Liberal blogs gave credence to the results of exit polls which showed Kerry ahead. After the election, many such blogs promoted theories of vote-stealing in the election, saying that the exit polls which had Kerry ahead, show that the official vote counts are incorrect.

Mainstream media is, to its credit, debunking those theories; but conflates Lib bloggers with Conservative bloggers, and states that bloggers in general promoted those theories. In fact the Conservative bloggers, such as Little Green Footballs, Instapundit, PoliPundit and others, explicitly stated on election day that the exit polls were unreliable.

From an election day post by Instapundit:

MYSTERY P0LLSTER on leaked exit polls: “Listen, I understand human nature, and I’m not going to try to change it. We are all intensely curious about what is going to happen tonight, and most of us will find a way to peek at leaked exit polls at some point today. I just want you to know that those leaked exit polls really don’t tell us much more about the outcome of the race than the telephone polls we were obsessing over just a few hours ago.” We’ll know the result soon enough. Usually, I don’t even look at that stuff until the actual results come out. Of course, this is the first Presidential election I’ve blogged.

From an election day post by Little Green Footballs titled “Imaginary Numbers”:

By the way, people, as far as I know at this point, there are no valid exit polls in existence. The numbers appearing at Daily Kos and Wonkette are sheer fantasy.

From an election day post by PoliPundit:

Exit polls are worthless. Just ask Mystery Pollster. Also, they were wrong in 2000 and 2002.

And from the Mystery Pollster article quoted by Instapundit and PoliPundit:

So look at [exit polls] if you must, but please, don’t go plugging the numbers into spreadsheets and assume that your Electoral College “projections” have any special magic or scientific validity.

The notion that the Conservative weblogs supported any theories that the election of Bush is invalid, is laughable on the face of it.

Is it possible MSM is ignorant of all this? It’s more likely that MSM is intentionally trying to mislead the public.

Mainstream media will not succeed in this effort. They’ll lose it just like they lost the presidential election. There are too many of us telling the truth now.