Media Misinformation 2010 vs. 2008

[Geee]

American Thinker:




Thanks to the University of Maryland (via the New York Times), the left has come up with an explanation for the Republican landslide in 2010: the voters were ignorant thanks to biased media coverage perpetrated mostly by Fox News.

This conclusion, based on a study/poll which has only slightly more credibility than a Keith Olbermann rape rant, caused me great amusement because I commissioned not one, but two scientific polls about the 2008 election which came to virtually the same conclusion (minus the Fox News part). Those surveys were universally, and at times maliciously, attacked by the left to the point where the Zogby organization refused to duplicate the first one because of all the blowback.

The purpose of my polls was to quantify the impact of the media's remarkable pro-Obama and anti-Palin bias on the electorate for my documentary, Media Malpractice. What we found back then was that McCain voters and those "exposed" to Fox News and talk radio were far more likely to answer our simple multiple-choice questions correctly than Obama voters and those "exposed" to any other media outlet. The most dramatic example was that those voters "exposed" to "conservative" media were far more informed when it came to simply knowing that it was the Democratic Party which controlled congress at the time. This turned out to be rather determinative when it came to voters' presidential choice.

Conversely, we discovered that it was only when it came to knowing all the negative stories about Sarah Palin (an incredible 98% of those "exposed" to MSNBC knew that Palin was the candidate with the pregnant teenage daughter) that those consumers of the more liberal outlets excelled. Otherwise, fans of liberal media were far more likely to get our easy questions wrong.