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The latest polls show GWB with extremely low approval ratings.
As a professional market researcher, it is part of my job to design market research studies, write the questionnaires, supervise the fieldwork, and analyze the results.
One traditional use of market research is to determine the efficiency of advertising campaigns. One way in which this is done is via awareness and attitude studies. In these studies, people are contacted, screened to include only those who are potential customers, and then asked a series of questions designed to determine their awareness of and attitudes towards the product or service.
Changes in attitudes can often interpreted as being in part the result of changes in the product's ad campaign.
This leads us to the error in MSM reports about these polls. MSM reports rarely (if ever) note that their own coverage - in this case, the equivalent of a product's ad campaign - is part of the cause of the lower poll ratings.
If MSM had been boosting GWB for the past 6 years, rather than slamming him as they have done - e.g. if they had been printing the good news from Iraq, as well as the bad, or if they had been presenting the good news on the economy as prominently as its significance deserves - there can be little doubt that his poll ratings would be higher.
The poll results are a measure of MSM's biased coverage as much as they are of the President's job performance.
Given MSM's relentlessly biased coverage, it is not possible to reasonably interpret presidential polls as being exclusively a result of the facts about the president's policies; the polls measure the result of MSM coverage at least as much.
There is a saying in the advertising business: nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. This means that if the product is bad, good advertising will get more people to try it faster, find out about how bad it is, and drop it.
But I have never yet heard of a study of how fast intentionally damaging advertising can hurt a good product. And MSM's biased coverage is very similar to intentionally damaging advertising.
#1
#2Don't regulate the MSM.
Simply bring it under product liability. The MSM's current "product" is shoddy, dishonest, and dangerous to the public.
Members of the public should be able to sue for damages, and, if proved... big awards.
#3An interesting experiment would be for a president with some obvious negatives and no particular achievements were to be given a boost by the MSM for years, to see what the polls reflected.
Oh wait. We did run that experiment in the 90's.
#4The MSM's fury and bias againsy GWB is comparable to that of the northern press towards Lincoln in the first years of the civil wat, as the north lost battle after battle. There are many other comparable istuations in our history, the most recent being Truman and the Korean War. His losses in polls were comparable. His lack of congressional support was comparable.
A larage part of the American population (I do not remember whether it was 1/3 or 2/3) was vehemently against the Revolutionary war---which the revolutionaries were losing until the crossing of the Delaware in mid winter--a desperate effort by Washington ( perhaps comparable to GWB and Baghdad?).
#5I think the statistics for the colonists at the outbreak of the War for Independence were as follows: 1/3 for Independence, 1/3 Loyalists (Tories), and 1/3 Just leave me alone and let me make a living - a pox on both your houses!
If it weren't for General Sherman's brutal march through Georgia at the same time as General Grant's a siege of Petersburg, VA, Abraham Lincoln would never have been re-elected.
The surrender at Appomattox (often thought of as the end of the war) ocurred five days before Lincoln's assasination. It wasn't until after his assassination that Lincoln's reputation was glorified by the very people who had reviled him - the press.
The MSM has been in a position of unregulated freedom for entirely too long. They no longer serve the purpose of supplying information to the general public, rather, they have become political functionaries in the most obvious sense. As their current political motivation is the destruction of the Presidency of George Bush, their stories have had an unrelenting negativity.
The time has long since passed that the MSM needs to be REGULATED.
Remember, capitalism was at it's worst in the early Industrial Revolution, when it was not regulated. Dictators face no regulation. Food became dangerous to the general population in the era before regulation, and it took strong laws to bring food production up to levels of safety.
It's time to regulate the MSM.