This would be how politics was supposed to work if the people were deciding for themselves. But they aren’t always getting the chance to make these decisions. The media makes choices on who to cover, and they don’t do that based on actual response from the people. Nobody in the media predicted Herman Cain’s ascendency as the front runner (and according to polls, which aren’t a good reflection) he is. But every time Cain’s lead in the polls is reported it’s followed by the claim that he isn’t really the favorite, it’s an expression of dissatisfaction with the other candidates. But they don’t support that claim with any facts. They could find, or conduct polls to prove their point, or even present actual voters and their opinions, but all we get is the same old same old set of analysts who are proved wrong about most of their predictions.
If the Republican American people know it, that’s the way they’ll vote. But right now what they know will be heavily influenced by the media. People have to take responsibility too. They shouldn’t be voting for the candidate selected by the media, but the influence is pervasive. And neither you, nor the media knows what will happen here. You can make guesses, they can be educated guesses, but they’re still guesses. You’d be hard pressed to find a media mouthpiece who predicted victory for Obama at this stage of the game in the last election. The consensus was that Hillary was unbeatable. A great deal of Obama’s appeal was based on his proving the media wrong in the primary phase.
No, the consensus was absolutely not that Hillary was unbeatable. That’s a ludicrous assertion, and it is simply false.
If Herman Cain wins in the first primaries, well, then I’ll be proven wrong. Except, of course I don’t expect to be proven wrong. Yes, the assertion that Cain is not a credible candidate is an educated guess. But so what? So is the assertion that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. It’s an educated guess because everything we think we know about modern presidential politics says he can’t win the nomination.
Look, if you declared your candidacy tomorrow for Republican nominee, how much media coverage would you get? How much do you think you should get? You wouldn’t get any coverage, and you shouldn’t get any coverage. The only reason Cain is getting anywhere in the polls right now is that no one knows anything about him.
I admit ‘unbeatable’ was incorrect. She was considered the de facto front runner.
The more people find out about Herman Cain, the better he does in the polls. I’m not running for president, but Perry showed how a candidate can jump into an election and get the media anointment. Based on his politics? No. The reports were that he was going to have the campaign funding behind him, and thus he was a credible candidate. He only had to open his mouth to dispel that notion. We might not be so lucky with the next guy who uses the ‘buy the campaign’ strategy, and gets the media to fall for it.
They did look for and did include previous research. They explicitly stated in their report:
“This is echoed by three other studies—Hamilton (2004), Lott and Hasset (2004), and Sutter (2004), the only empirical studies of media bias by economists of which we are aware.”
And then they proceed to discuss those studies and their methodologies.
No organization can give equal and identical coverage to every candidate, nor can they hold off on covering anyone until the votes are counted, nor should they pretend everybody has an equal shot to win. I agree with some of what you said in your long post (I don’t have the time to go point by point right now), but you can’t argue on the one hand that the media picks the candidates and then say on the other hand that they’re frequently wrong about who the winners and frontrunners are. Those arguments contradict each other.
The press treated Dean as the frontrunner going into Iowa in 2004, but he didn’t win, and then they stopped treating him like the frontrunner because he wasn’t. They treated Hillary Clinton as the favorite early in the 2007-8 process, which made sense because she was the best-known candidate and had the largest fundraising operation, but she she didn’t win.
He does have the fundraising behind him. His campaign raised $17 million in the third quarter, which was more than any of the other candidates. Romney was apparently close behind. Nobody else brought in half that much. That’s not to say that money won’t dry up if Perry keeps floundering out there. Cain hasn’t disclosed his fundraising. He’s said it will be better than the $2.1 million he made in the second quarter, but I’m guessing it won’t be much more, and you’ll notice how far behind that is.
You know why she was considered the front runner? Because she was the front runner. Being the front runner doesn’t mean you’re unbeatable, it just means that at this time, you’re ahead. She was the leading in the polls for a long time. But Obama was never miles and miles behind her, he was always polling very near her numbers. And it wasn’t like she when she was polling first or second, the first place or second place candidate didn’t change weekly. It was always Obama nipping at her heels, not one week Obama, the next John Edwards, the next Dennis Kucinich, the next Ralph Nader, the next Donald Trump.
The reason Romney is considered the real front runner by “The Media”, despite being outpolled this week my Cain, is that he’s polled first or second for the last freaking year, and the entire Republican nomination process has boiled down to “Romney or somebody else” except the Republicans can’t decide who what somebody else should be. If Herman Cain had been consistently polling second place to Romney for the last year, and was as of today suddenly polling ahead, I guarantee you that the poll results wouldn’t be reported with the asterisk.
Yes, a candidate can jump in and generate a ton of press. When they’re, you know, a successful politician holding a major elective office, like, you know, Governor of Texas. Perry was regarded as a credible challenger because he had won real-life elections in the past, and had real supporters and real cronies and real moneybags guys behind him.
I checked those, what are the odds when all of them come from conservative sources? But never mind that, once again you are ignoring the point that (specially when researchers do jump to areas that are not in their scope) looking at the previous research from experts in the area is vital.
No, the more I check, the less I agree with the paper you are basing your ideas with here. The other item that after more checking discredits this research even more IMHO is that they also cited the right-wing website WorldNetDaily in the bibliography.
The fact remains that looking at previous research is important, but it is peculiar that they concentrated on biased 2004 research, and they never bothered to check journalistic journals that dealt with the issue before or that they were more recent.
Actually what you posted there is an “important example of the importance of interdisciplinary communication”, the point I’m making. Sticking to only economical sources, and in the era of the internet, the paper you are referring to early looks more to be an incomplete one.
Yes, i didn’t make my points clearly so they sound contradictory. Short on time here also.
Nothing much I can argue with in that assessment. I find the influence of money a big problem though, and my point is that it influences the media because they end up receiving a big share of it.
I believe the media has done the boiling down. It’s an opinion.
Perry’s popularity is overblown. He won a majority in a heavily divided election. I don’t have enough data to analyze, but I hear a lot of indications that he’s not as popular in Texas as the media has often reported. And as I said in prior posts, the media gets a lot of the money. Deliberate conspiracy? I don’t know, doesn’t seem likely. Undisclosed conflict of interest, I think so.
I don’t think they sound contradictory, I think they are contradictory. Why aren’t they? Analysts make all kinds of incorrect predictions, I agree, and I think they should get out of that game and cut way down on the revolving door between politics and political talkshows. But you can’t say at the same time that they choose the candidates for the public and then criticize them for being wrong in their predictions all the time.
I think the media (with the exception of FOX, until they separate clearly to viewers their opinion shows from the newscast, then I would agree that they are a little bit more mainstream) is on the whole neither conservative nor liberal, they adjust to the common denominator from their viewers to attract business.
But they are in the end a business, and there is no business now like the business the elections bring to the media outfits. It is crucial for the media to ensure that the contest will be.. well, contested. They already know that if Cain is the nominee a good number of republicans will not bother to vote, and for election coverage profits the media (do you really think advertisements by the politicians and pressure groups are not their bread and butter too?) would not like it if the coming presidential contest is not a horse race.
I am not sure how popular he is in Texas right now, and I agree the press has a habit of treating every state governor (or even ex-governor!) as if he or she is universally popular. I’ve heard it said they did that with Pawlenty, and Chris Christie’s popularity in New Jersey is not what it was, either. But I’m not sure where you’re getting that “he won a majority in a heavily divided election.” The 2010 election was not that close- he won by about 55 percent to 42 percent. Maybe not a landslide, but a clear win. He’s in his third term now. That does sound like a fairly accurate reading of the 2006 election, which he won in a four-way race, 39%-30%-18%-12%.
Dean was originally castigated by the media for saying that maybe the invasion of Iraq wasn’t such a good idea. And because he was basically the only Dem candidate taking a firm early stance against what the Bush administration was doing, the lefty blogosphere started supporting him. That election was the first one where blogging played a part and the emerging liberal blogosphere, people like Atrios who was the Instapundit of liberal bloggers, all got behind Dean early and bashed the media for not covering him/only covering him as a crazed anti-war leftist.
And because of that crazed lefty image he was a turnoff to Dem voters who were sick of being called unpatriotic for not being 100% behind the war and just wanted somebody to beat Bush. Dean was seen as just too far left for a country a couple of years after 9/11 and the media helped stuff him in that pigeonhole despite him being a fiscal conservative (balanced budgets in Vermont!) which incurred the wrath of the lefty bloggers who wanted him nominated and saw the media as having defeated him.
I agree cain isn’t going to win and this is his fifteen minutes. But it’ll be interesting to see what eventually causes him to fall out of top spot. Romney looks the least worst option for Republicans right now. I’m still disappointed the snowbilly didn’t run.
I read both the “mainstream” media and the leading conservative publications and websites. So, I can tell you one thing for certain: NOBODY is cheerleading for Mitt Romney.
The conservative media have been continually pining for someone, ANYONE, to come along and beat Romney, whom they (rightly) don’t trust. They used to hope Rick Perry would be that man. Then they hoped Chris Christie might run. By now, the conservative media are pretty much resigned to their fate. They know Romney has the nomination all but sewn up, and are trying to tell themselves, “Oh well, maybe Romney won’t really be that bad.”
And the mainstream media only like ONE Republican candidate: Jon Huntsman. For some reason, media liberals are swooning for Huntsman (who has no chance of winning the Republican nomination) the way they did for John McCain in 2000.
He’s a moderate candidate with an interesting background. Even so, the fascination with Huntsman seems to have passed since he has consistently remained way back in the polls.
Sigh… you people just can’t let go of Sarah Palin. She isn’t President, isn’t Vice Presdient, isn’t even governor of Alaska, and isn’t running for any office. But you STILL want to pretend she matters.
She entertains me. I wanted to see her have to answer some more tough questions, like what newspapers do you read. And we need entertaining to mitigate the whole GOP fail parade that’s currently being inflicted on us.
I watched the Dean Scream live as well. It was a disappointing night for him. He was the favorite for almost a year, and in the first contest, he finishes 3rd.
Instead of admitting that it was a less than fortunate night, Dean charges onstage, rolls up his sleeves and acts like he just won the Super Bowl. The scream was only part of it, but as I watched live, I got the impression that he was losing it. He finished terrible, but tried unconvincingly to make it seem like he just got laid backstage by 3 Miss USA contestants.
Nobody bought it and it made him look dishonest. I got that impression before any media commentary.
It’s only vital in the sense that you may be performing a test that is less thorough than what has been done before, or simply recreating something which has been done before to a sufficient extent.
If your test is a far better test than what’s been done before, then all’s well.
The critiques you mention don’t point out any methodological issues that would lead to the results being wrong, unless data was cherry picked – like that they chose years from the input materials that (for whatever random reason) skewed the results in a particular direction. But there’s no evidence that they did so. Like I said, it may just be that those were the materials that they had available to them.
You’ve pointed out the existence of other genuine, peer-reviewed studies which have been done that came to a different conclusion. But I haven’t seen the actual studies. You linked me to the top page of a journal’s website. I don’t know what methodology was used, and whether it seems like it was a better or worse test. They might just have sent surveys out to news reporters asking them whether they tried to stay objective. Well it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if those all came back as “yes”, but it’s not much of a test.
Ultimately, complaining that Groseclose & Milyo could have put wider search terms into the computer at the library is all well and dandy, but it doesn’t change much. Either the test is a reasonable test, or it isn’t and there’s something better. Show me the better test and I’ll support it as the stronger test.