Editorial: "Media Malpractice... How Obama Got Elected"

Editorial by John Ziegler
John Ziegler Responds to the Attacks Provoked by www.HowObamaGotElected.com
11/18/2008

While I am gratified that hundreds of thousands of people have viewed (and throughly enjoyed) the youtube video video that I created for www.howobamagotelected.com
I have been distressed by the general nature of the liberal response. I should probably hold off on sharing the over-the-top profanity-laced e-mail I have received (for now), but just go to the comments section of the video and see for yourself!

While I guess I should not have expected much from the followers of a false Messiah virtually installed by an adoring media, even I have been a bit taken aback by the absurdity and intensity of much of the reaction to the video and the Zogby poll that I commissioned.

Here are the major complaints and my response to them.

"You should have polled McCain voters and they would have been just as dumb."

Many critics who are obsessed with this issue are totally missing the point of the entire project. I was not trying to prove that Obama voters are dumber or less informed than those who voted for McCain. I only polled Obama voters because I was trying to test the media's impact on the election. Since Obama won, it would be pointless (not to mention twice as expensive) to poll McCain voters.

On Fox News Monday night I challenged anyone to commission the same poll of McCain voters and if McCain voters faired as badly, or worse, I will pay their expenses. If not, they have to pay mine. One serious inquiry has been made, but I doubt they will have the guts to follow through. Gee, I wonder why.

"Your questions were biased/wrong"

These questions were carefully chosen to try and identify which news stories broke through the clutter and reached the average Obama voter. Ironically, one of the main reasons that the questions enrage the left is that many of the questions were based on news stories that the left-wing media ignored. In other words, because the left-wing ignored the negative aspects of Obama's past, they weren't reported and therefore weren't significant (or didn't really happen)and so any mention of them is evidence of a right-wing agenda lacking in credibility. Holy circular argument Batman!!

Many left-wing blogs (and many of the thousands of e-mail I have recieved from their readers) are absolutely obsessed with trying to prove that the wording of certian questions was not 100% accurate, as if that would have made any difference at all except in the case of the question about Russia.

To me this shows how nuts the left is over this whole thing. If they weren't drinking the Kool Aide and desperate to come up with some way of explaining the unexplainable they would realize that the point of the question was to gauge whether or not the person heard enough media coverage about a subject to know the answer. There was ABSOLUTELY ZERO DOUBT as to who the answer any of the questions. The specific wording (again, except in the case of Russia) was almost irrelevant. Though I point out that, while the inherent nature of the summarizing of complex events in a single simple question is always open for debate, I stand by the accuaracy of all of them.



"You were just out to make Obama voters look stupid and you are probably a racist"

Nothing could be further from the truth. We went out of our way to find articulate people who thought they were informed about the election. I did not even choose the subjects myself (for whatever it is worth, they were chosen by a black female). The reason there are slightly more blacks than whites in the video is that we went to a "black" area of town in the morning when we had more light and then it got dark faster than I expected in the "white" area.

The point of all this is to direct the finger at the news media, not so much at the voters. There are plenty of idiots on both sides of the political divide, but my concern here is that the news media coverage failed to make the electorate educated enough to produce a legitimately informed vote.

"The Zogby Poll was "Pushing Polling" and illegitimate"

This pile of horse manure was pushed by a guy, who until today, I thought was pretty credible. Nate Silver runs a website devoted to political polling. He pretends to be objective in his reporting but I learned today that he is a total left-wing hack who has no idea what he is talking about. He wrote this bogus column (which, of course, was picked up by most of the usual "nutroot" websites) laughably claiming that the Zogby poll was a "push poll." A push poll is usually thought of as a tactic used to spread negative information through polling by one campaign to do damage to another, or to get a desired result . It is rather obvious that Silver (whose website is devoted to polling!!) doesn't even understand what a "push poll" is!

There are many questions people should ask about the Zogby poll, but as John Zogby himself pointed out, whether it is a "push poll" is not one of them (unless you have no idea what you are talking about, kind of like Nate Silver).

I was so angered by Silver's hit piece on me and the Zogby poll that I asked for him to interview me. He agreed and finally called me a couple of hours later. Neither of us had the ability to record a phone call so we agreed that he would transcribe the conversation and post it in its entirely on his website.

Frankly, I was stunned by his lack of basic knowledge he possessed and the lack of research he had done regarding this issue. I learned that he wrote this hit piece without even knowing BASIC FACTS like whether the Zogby poll was done by phone or on the web (it was clearly done by phone) or having even read the actual questions which were laid out on both our websites for all the world to see.

His agenda was so obvious and his credibility so laughable that as the interview wore on I stopped caring about my responses and really just let him have it. Finally when he started quizzing me about little known U.S. Senators (questions I got right, btw) I decided to end the interview. If he deserved any respect I would feel badly that I acted unprofessionally in ending it with a profanity, but he obviously does not, so I don't.

Here is the (significantly altered though still mostly accurate) transcript that Silver ended up posting. For the record, his transcript leaves out huge chunks of the ending sequence (including him acknowledging that his basis for claiming that I was misleading people was only that he disagreed with me politically), but I was surprised it wasn't even more of a hatchet job than it is.

"You are a conservative who doesn't like Obama so this is not credible"

This is my "favorite" liberal canard in these situations. They don't like the answers so they go all "Joe the Plumber" on the questioner. What my political beliefs have to do with the answers that Obama voters gave to simple questions that were recorded by cameras and independent pollsters is beyond me. So I guess the only way this experiment would be credible is if I were a liberal black lesbian??

The bottom line here is that this poll proves that this election (like perhaps all of our elections) was illegitimate and based almost entirely on the news media deciding it wanted (for various reasons) Barack Obama to be President. I plan to prove that with my next documentary "Media Malpractice... How Obama Got Elected"
http://johnziegler.com/editorials_details.asp?editorial=176