Tag: News Anchors

Thank You For Making My Point!

Daily Agitator

We are bombarded daily but this poll or that poll….the Prez popularity is falling or rising or ………More people are conserv…the country is going in the wrong direction….are a few of the polls that the media is SO addicted to these days…a minute by minute look at how Americans view Washington and its players……these figures are used to drive the political debate or drive the story of the day….but how accurate are these figures?

From the Newser website:

Yeah, it’s expensive, but pollsters need to start calling cellphones. According to the latest CDC data, 23% of US adults, or 25% of US households are cellphone-only, writes Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com. Add in “cellphone-mostly” households and that jumps to 40%—and it could be even higher by November, never mind 2012. These people are just being ignored, even though they are very different from their landline counterparts. Cellphone-only users are more likely to be young, urban, poor, and technologically savvy than their peers. “All of these characteristics are correlated with political viewpoints and voting behavior,” Silver argues. Pollsters try to compensate by “upweighting” the few young people they do reach, but that’s a lousy solution, and a recent Pew study proves it. Pew pitted a weighted landline-only poll against one that called cells and discovered that the latter swung six points in Democrats’ favor—a statistically significant result.

I have been preaching this all the way back to the 2008 election when daily polls were all the news…..during the election I asked why the people with cels were not part of the poll…..and that any poll that did not include these people was NOT accurate in any way and should be ignored completely….I said that then and it is MORE important now.

Olbermann/Matthews Revisited

NBC‘s decision to move Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews out of the MSNBC anchor slots for this fall’s election – widely seen as an attempt to protect the traditional NBC News brand – points up a longer-term problem with splitting that brand, a rival executive said yesterday.

After weeks of infighting, several uncomfortable on-air moments and mounting criticism that MSNBC’s political coverage was tainting NBC’s image of objectivity, NBC announced that David Gregory would become MSNBC’s chief anchor. Olbermann and Matthews will continue as analysts.

Critics have already weighed in on that question. When speakers were blasting the alleged bias of mainstream media at the Republican convention last week, delegates chanted, “N-B-C!”

Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, who has engaged in a heated feud with Olbermann, said Thursday night, “The networks are biased, there’s no question, and NBC is the worst.”

NBC News may not take its cues from O’Reilly, but it is not immune to the perception.

That’s where it’s gotten tricky for NBC. If “Nightly News” anchor Brian Williams is on MSNBC, is he labeled opinionated like the rest?

The impact of moving Olbermann and Matthews out won’t matter much to the typical viewer, who looks at MSNBC as just another cable network, said analyst Andrew Tyndall.

“NBC has established such a good reputation over the years because of Tim Russert, who made it the place to go for politics,” said Tyndall, publisher of the Tyndall Report, which tracks coverage. “This is really a symbolic move.”