I'll be delivering my special lecture this afternoon - 1:30-2:20pm - to my "Intro to Communication and Media Studies" class at Fordham University on "The Media Misreporting of Ron Paul"....
I'll be discussing Hannity and Colmes' denigration of Ron Paul's first place finish in their own poll after the last Republican Presidential debate on Fox, ABC's indication of a lone Ron Paul supporter before the Iowa straw poll when his supporters say there were numerous, ABC Radio Mark Levin's call to his listeners to harass Ron Paul headquarters, ABC's cropping Dennis Kucinich out of a photo of the Democratic candidates (Ron Paul is not the only victim of mass media malfeasance in reporting the Presidential campaign), and much more.
My blog post about this upcoming lecture two months ago received 1290 Diggs, 190 comments, and was on the Digg front page for days.
YouTube video will follow next week.
5 comments:
Wish I could be there, but I'm looking forward to hearing accounts of the discussion.
Do you think the media continually discounts the results of their own polls because they erroneously believe that Ron Paul is two people? He does have two first names after all.
Have fun.
Straw polls and internet polls are not truly democratic. They mean nothing, and they should be downplayed by the media.
Ron Paul is around 1-2% in most polls, and I see no real movement in his candidacy. The media are just reporting the hard reality that he is a fringe candidate with little real support.
While I agree that Paul is outside the group of the more high profile candidates, I don't think the assertion that "the media are just reporting the hard reality that he is a fringe candidate with little real support" is completely correct.
The media are actually reporting a slightly distorted view of reality where Paul and most of the other lower profile candidates in both parties (not to mention independents) are excluded from the picture altogether. They are marginalized not by their poll numbers but by the interpretation of the poll numbers. Your comment shows one of the ways that poll numbers are interpreted by the news organizations, effectively casting these people aside.
I'm not saying that's what you're trying to do, but when the media determined that polls show a politician has little real support and keeps their name and face out of any conversation about candidacy, it ignores the thousands and tens of thousands of people who believe passionately in what candidate X is trying to discuss.
I think the people working for these people would disagree that the support they are giving is either little or somehow unreal. If the voices of these candidates are silenced by omission or by marginalization, how democratic can we really say we are? It's the role of the media to hold up the lower profile candidates so their ideas stand next to their high profile counterparts. It's for the people to decide who deserves to be listened to, not the news media.
Where the skewed internet polls come in, we find supporters of people like Paul flooding polls and perhaps skewing data. So what? The rules of the poll are flawed to begin with and what the skewed data shows is that there is a group of mobilized supporters using everything in their means to get some much needed publicity. If the other candidates' supporters wanted to do the exact same thing, they could flood the poll as well. The point is, they don't.
What does that mean? It means that there is democratic power in the internet. That power is the power of a smaller group to mobilize and make itself heard in the face of tough obstacles for message distribution. It may not give us accurate poll results, but it does tell us something important. The support that Paul enjoys is real, strong, and mobilized. That tells as much about a candidate as the stumping on the "debates" does.
Excellent analysis, Mike.
To Roddy - you should study the history of scientific (randomly sampled) polling - they are by no means infallible.
Nor is your conclusion that the Internet polls "mean nothing" correct. A more realistic appraisal would be they are measuring something different than the random stratified sample polls.
Ultimately, the elections themselves - primary and general - will tell us which polls were the most accurate.
One other point: even if the Internet polls are not accurate, does that give ABC the right to show a photograph of a lone Ron Paul supporter, when in fact there were numerous supporters at the Iowa rally? Or, does it give ABC the right to leave Ron Paul out of the reports of its own polls, when ABC mentions candidates who did worse than Ron Paul?
I agree with Mike (darn you for responding before me on everything)
When the media downplays candidates support the logic becomes circular. They don't cover him or her because they are unpopular, and they are viewed as unpopular because he or she does not recieve media coverage.
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