The MSNBC evening lineup gave a fair amount of play tonight to a couple of results from the new NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll. This was sort of like a non-partisan push poll: voters were read a series of nine negative statements -- three for each of the three remaining candidates -- and asked about their level of concern on each one.
MSNBC spent most of their time focusing on two of these issues -- what I call "Obama/bitter" (his recent comments on religion and guns) and "Obama/values" (his associations with Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers). You might assume, from having seen the programming, that these were the foremost concerns to their poll respondents. But of course they weren't.
Below, I have translated their polling results to a Likert Scale, where 1 represents "No Real Concern" and 4 represents a "Major Concern".
Judged by this metric, "Obama/bitter" and "Obama/values" rank just fifth and sixth on the list, respectively. Instead, the issue that concerns the voters the most is "Clinton/flip-flops". That is followed by two McCain issues -- his closeness with George W. Bush and his own flip-flops (to its credit, MSNBC did report the Bush result on air) -- and then another Clinton ("Clinton/honesty") before we get to the first two Obama issues. Meanwhile, the two issues that strike me as unambiguously being cheap shots -- "McCain/age" and "Obama/patriotism" -- are of very little concern to voters.
If you had to rank these nine issue in terms of how much attention the media has given to them recently, what would that result look like? My guess is something like:
1. Obama / values (6)
2. Clinton / Bill (7)
(tie) Obama / bitter (5)
(tie) Clinton / honesty (4)
5. McCain / age (8)
6. McCain / Bush (2)
(tie) Clinton / flip-flops (1)
(tie) Obama / patriotism (9)
9. McCain / flip-flops (3)
Of course, this is a subjective exercise, and my judgments about where the media has been spending its time could be wrong (I really think the week I did the best job of political analysis was the week that my cable was broken). But from what I can tell, there is actually something of an inverse relationship between those issues the media has spent the most time focusing on, and those that are of the most concern to voters in the media's own polling.
Not that this is breaking any news.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Voters v. Media: a concerning result
-- Nate at 10:42 PM
Labels: controversy, msm
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8 comments
I think we'll have to wait a few days, but I think some of the polls coming out indicate Obama
might have actually bottomed out,
and Hillary has peaked. And I not you have Obama's GE chances rising again.
And Clinton has been unable to
increase her narrowing superdelegate lead.
And when Clinton starts going negative (again) she only hurts the party.
That's my horse sense on this too.
The media focus on those issues because they get ratings. Where the mistake is made is people assume that the same people who are watching cable news are also voters. I think people like watching the Obama/values and Obama/bitter because they are compelling dramas and there is nothing that says the people driving ratings are also voters (unless you have polls on that too, which wouldn't suprise me). Just look at the 2004 GE. Kerry was killed by the flipflop/honesty story. The media didn't start that story and only covered it grudgingly. It was propelled by outside groups looking to affect an election not chase ratings.
The obvious reason why the media is making such a fuss about the Obama / Bitter controversy is because network (especially cable) news anchors are about as out-of-touch as they come.
You should make a scatter plot out of how the media covers issues to how voters are concerned with them and put in a best-fit line.
I keed, I keed. This site has the only election coverage that I feel is worthwhile anymore. If everyone else would just read it they'd see that everything has gone completely as expected for two months now, even with all the psuedoscandals in both sides.
One very interesting result, to me, is that despite the media love for McCain as "straight talker," actual voters seem to get that he's a flip-flopper.
I see you have not included today's Quinnipiac polls. I will be interested to see if PA now goes in the Obama column when you have included these.
I think the scatter plot suggestion is an excellent one. I'm not kidding.
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