NYT finds holes in their polls | Opinion

I came across just an astonishing story today in The New York Times, portions of whichI want to quickly share here with you, my friends.

If you tune into this place even semi-regularly, you know I have a big problem with political polls. Besides being complete, unsubstantiated garbage (wrong), they can be dangerous, and used as divisive tools to cool the vote and/or drive false narratives heading into an election.

Worse, too often they are used by corporate media like The Times to drive up readership and viewership to their shaky news outlets, which is one of the highest crimes in journalism: When you make the story about yourself, you are then serving only yourself, and NOT your audience.

Maybe most important, these damn polls can cause a helluva lot of angst among the good-hearted, sane people in this country, whose senses have been under steady assault since the terrible blast on November 8, 2016, when we found out just how vulnerable we were as a nation.

READ: Why doesn't the media ever talk to Biden supporters?

These days, our Democracy hangs by a thread, and is under steady attack from a sick, morally-busted orange man, and his fawning political party who don’t value our sanity, our vote, or the truth.

Worse, we know these deviants are being backstopped by the majority of our Supreme Court, which is provably seated with bought-off, lying scoundrels, two of whom we now know for sure back insurrection.

You’d think these threats would dominate our corporate media’s time. There is no bigger story than the potential end of our Democracy.

Instead, we too often get terrifying polls, and for going on a year now, the NYT has been delivering them in a steady, corrosive stream. According to polls they don’t really believe themselves, but nonetheless have been showcasing breathlessly, Trump is beating President Joe Biden, and the end of our Democracy is but months away.

Before I treat you to the heated crap they turned around in today’s editions, let’s ask this question: If things are really as bad as the NYT is projecting in these damn polls, and a complete anti-American crook like Trump is somehow leading, why aren’t they sounding the alarms every, single hour and letting Americans know what is stake under an authoritarian government?

THAT is the real job of the media, and they are failing us miserably in that mission.

This morning, however, rather than report on Republicans’ steady attack on America, they tried out another spin for size. In a story written by their chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, edited by God knows who or what, and headlined “A Polling Risk for Trump” the newspaper explored why all these numbers they have been recklessly tossing around for eight months, are more suspect than a Rudy Giuliani press conference.

In other words, they belatedly punched holes in the poll numbers that they spent countless news cycles spreading like a disease.

Here’s how the endless, meandering story starts:

Hmmmm … not as stable as it looks, eh?

The Times literally just admitted to turning around shaky information for the better part of a year. This lede is so loaded, I’m surprised Cohn’s desk didn't collapse when he typed it.

There’s really no reason to read any further, after this all-too-casual admission that the information they have been providing is bull. Still, I popped a couple of aspirins, read further and came across this gem:

I mean …

I had to re-read that mess four times to make sure it was saying what I thought it did, and it seems to essentially mean this: The more people who start paying attention to this election, the better for Biden. The more people, who understand the stakes of this election, the better for Biden.

Back in February, the NYT buried this sentence into their loaded polling stories:“The limitations of polling are well known, especially almost a year before an election.”

Now they are telling us in so many words that all those polls they have broken out since then — replete with their “known limitations” — are in fact, limited to the point of being worthless.

Maybe if The New York Times would kick their damn polling habit, and finally started dealing with the enormous implications of this election, more people would become engaged in preserving our Democracy.

For now, I’ll remind you that whether the NYT starts doing their jobs or not, with more than five months to go, you can bet the electorate will become more engaged in this looming election. And when they do, they will realize what is at stake, and they will gravitate to Democrats and Joe Biden.

I know this, because this is what has taken place in nearly every important election since 2017, despite what all those worthless polls projected.

NOW READ: Inside the dangerous anti-democracy coalition forming to help Trump

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.

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