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Dear Colleagues…
Well, this was supposed to be your William Randolph Hearst moment, when you flexed your collective muscles and led the American people where you wanted them to go.
But somehow, they just didn’t listen. Maybe they didn’t like being called rubes, racists, misogynists and haters. You slept through those marketing courses, did you? It kinda showed.
You’re bleeding, by the way. Your ledger sheets are hemorrhaging. Your ratings are so low you have to climb into a hole to get to them.
Now what? You have two choices. You can get introspective and change or you can double-down. I think I know what you want to do. But is that really what you should do?
On the upside, you’re about to rediscover your skepticism and the idea of the press as watchdog. That you need to seize but you need to keep it, through both administrations on the right and the left.
Finally, take this as an opportunity to learn another important lesson. Can the polling units. They’re obviously not working. They’re misleading you and your audiences. Get out of the bubble. Go out into the hustings and rub elbows with the great unwashed. I can’t guarantee you they won’t bite but you’ve got to do it. Get in the car and crank the stereo.
Published in General
Picture Perfect.
Unexcelled satire.
Worth several more dips into its smile-inducing, head-nodding depths.
Thank you.
Speaking of Rubes, I’m trying to think of a NY Post-esque pun like “Trump Crosses the Rube-icon”, but I don’t want to encourage his more vitriolic opponents in their dramatic opinions regarding his naked authoritarianism which I feel are way overblown.
Well EJ, it’s been a hell of a ride.
Can you tweak the cover so the title of the magazine is “Newspeak”? That was my first thought when I saw it.
Seawriter
The public opinion polls really must become objective in their work instead of sampling more one side over the other. The news media must do their own investigations instead of reporting opinion sampling and favour press releases. Their partisanship over the decades has led the alt right to Photoshop a clipping from the election of 1948.
I truly resent that. I don’t consider myself alt right and all that that entails. I defy you to scour my writings on this site (and my Twitter feed) to come to the conclusion that I was anything other than a reluctant Trumper whose primary concern was the makeup of the United States Supreme Court.
Dean, Bro, do you even read Rico?
i did read Rico.
Don’t believe I was insulting @ejhill. I was saying the press’ failure to be objective in their work caused them to be blind to an alt right movement.
Anyway, my apologies for my failure to be clear.
EJ, according to the talking heads last night, the NY Daily News had an issue on the stands last night with a picture of Trump and the word ‘Loser!’. Looked for it myself and no joy, but if you can find it, it works even better.
A tip for the younger Presslings: keep your relationship with government and administration staffers professional and distanced. In other words, don’t marry them.
Too late for some old schoolers.
They aren’t sincere. The polls are their method of sowing division on “our” side and to demoralize their opponents and rally their friends. That the purpose of those media polls.
Theres no real consequence when they are wrong because they have the ability to gaslight and propagandize all they want. Spin and cover. People have short memories- thanks to them in part- and 4 years from now they will trot out those same pollsters.
Again, their goal is NOT to be right.
Also helps prevent in-breeding.
Perfect song selection EJ!
And to TPTB … this is great advice:
And actually, you don’t have to go anywhere. Just engage the 45% here in conversation. You might even learn something as well.
And it will be fun. Crank up the stereo … and Dream On!
He really should.
EJ, I fear you offered sound advice that cannot be heard. Their identity cannot be separated from the profession. In that case the profession always becomes a tool for the identity.
We are back to the era (if we really ever left it.) when media is to be a partisan endeavor and objectivity is locked in the closet.
The way to sort this out is more partisans with many points of view, not just two sides.
BTW, your posts are on my must read that day list. It is a real short list.
The magazine cover apparently exists. I tossed it up with “Dewey defeats Truman” on Facebook last night.
I don’t have EJ’s mad Photoshop skillz, or I might have done the same, and I’m not Alt-Right either.
Can’t speak for places where I don’t work, but that’s not how my paper operates. Polls are expensive, and if you get it wrong consistently, you lose credibility. A week out we had Clinton at 47, Trump at 39, and a huge chunk of “undecideds” that ended up going to Trump for the most part. It didn’t demoralize anyone; Trump came within spitting distance of taking the state.
From our paper today, which fanned out across the state to explore Trump’s strong showing:
Not a single quote from an academic or activist from the city, explaining away the rural vote. The only D politician who’s quoted says it was hard to find people who admitted supporting Clinton.
James, do you know if pollsters provide “rate of refusal” data? What percentage of their contacts (R or D) refused to participate in the poll?
My suspicion is a lot of Rs despise the media and pollsters and just won’t participate (ahem, speaking for someone I know personally…), which skews the results and fails to account for a lot of likely voters. That’s my guess anyway.
Pat Caddell made this point repeatedly. The refusal rates were through the roof this cycle. And I contributed to that. As a guy with a land line, I got endless poll calls (mostly robo). Didn’t answer a one of them.
You and I have touched on this before. Your paper doesn’t try to be something it’s not, that is, a national voice.
I have the opposite experience. In September I worked a college football game where the producer went out of his way to needlessly cram BLM anthem protesters into the show. I say needlessly because a) we never cover the anthem in a regular season matchup and b) he didn’t run the tape package until late in the 3rd quarter. But he felt the need to politicize the telecast no matter what. (Including making the talent comment on something he didn’t want to talk about.)
Somehow they don’t quite understand that not everyone wants to be preached to 24/7.
Was no one noticing the sheer number of people showing up at Trump rallies, versus Clinton functions (not in any way rallies)? Rush was pointing this out at every opportunity. The Press simply ignored what was right in front of their noses, and they got batted upside the head because of that.
Rush told a story today about people who refuse to answer exit polls. (It would work for pre-election polls as well.)
If the person refuses to tell you who they support, ask them who their neighbor supports. People might want to protect their own privacy (understandably), but won’t mind talking about their anonymous neighbor.
Meanwhile, at NR…
I don’t think this is a minor point at all. Most were against the SCOTUS ruling, but as you said, accepted it as one more wrong we had to live with, and then moved on. The Left, though, just had to rub it in. Rub it right into our faces. The cake thing was one of the ways how, and I think a lot of good, decent people looked at that stuff and went “That’s it. No more”. And now we have President Trump.
I would argue that it was that plus the dictate on mixed sex bathrooms and locker rooms. The whole LGBT campaign was the solution to a problem that did not exist. You not only had to accept something that violated your conscience, but you had to encourage and cheer for more of it. They finally went too far.
That Hillary’s staff was so disbelieving on election day indicated two things. One, they had come to rely on the customized poll designed to drive opinion, instead of find it. Two, so long had they relied on this type of poll that they forgot that over-sampling, or over-estimating turnout of key groups that drove results in the last election were assumptions not tested by truth, and so they actually came to believe the numbers. The polls were their Achille’s heel.
Secondly, I think Donald’s efforts to reach out to the African-American community resolved tension created by the news media and democrat writers, making them less likely to feel the urgency of having to vote against him, even if they were not convinced enough to pop a vote for him. Together with Hillary not being an especially likable candidate, this probably depressed the African-American vote which was not captured in the polling, at least in the sampling.
I’d add that we (I)) fell into that assertion that ‘rallies don’t translate in to victories’. Though I still think it’s true , there clearly was something happening there, similar to the Tea Party wave. I do recall commenting on the intensity of these supporters and how most politicians would kill for that – people on both sides, elites on both sides, were blinded by their contempt of Trump to accurately assess what was going on.