Another desperate call for attention
: Frank Barnako makes another logical two-step in his effort to attack bloggers and get blog traffic. Whining about bloggers’ release of (meaningless, laughable) exit-poll data, he sniffs:
The problem some high-profile bloggers have now is they have proven to be untrustworthy. The brush paints a wide swath. Even Wonkette, aka Ana Marie Cox, said she hopes the experience “teaches people not to trust media in general.”
The concepts of reliability and accuracy have tested many bloggers. Wonkette has even joked about actually making a phone call to check a fact. Too bad a few bloggers, perhaps driven by ego and the desire to be noticed and linked by other Web loggers, didn’t do the same. Making these errors gives “old, big media” just another club to try to swat this vibrant, new new medium.
And just whom are they supposed to call? The errors in the exit polls weren’t the bloggers’. They were the pollsters’. The bloggers merely reported what they said — and gave the public credit for knowing how wrong pollsters always are. (By this rule, every time Matt Lauer swings to Al Roker, he ought to say, “Now here’s Al, who’s full of crap.”)
: Glenn Reynolds said the big-media spin is that bloggers are to blame for leaking the data.
I say bloggers should get credit for being open. Barnako replies:
“Bloggers were telling the public what they knew. Big media was not,” writes Jeff Jarvis in a posting at Buzzmachine.com. Taking an “information wants to be free” posture, Jarvis said if he still held the ethics of “old, big media,” he wouldn’t feel this way. But old, big media’s maturity prevented it from making a gaffe. They did not tell the public what they knew. They knew the polls were wrong.
Ha! They didn’t know the polls were wrong until the actual votes — and the GOP — told them. Here’s the moment when that happened: The Bush campaign told the networks — and then the bloggers — that the actual votes were coming in higher than the exit polls. And that wasn’t just spin. It was true.
