Friday, September 26, 2008

Debate polls

CNN's phone poll of about 500 showed Obama as the strong debate winner among those who watched, but John King at CNN noted that since more Democrats tend to watch debates this poll does not give us a good enough picture of things. We'll want to know how each candidate fared within their own parties and more importantly how noncommitted voters viewed this debate. Ultimately the candidates need to change minds, not reinforce existing votes from already supportive constituencies.

Fox's text poll, now underway on TV, is a shamelessly foolish excercise in biased polling that will offer little insight into anything. Fox viewers are not representative of national averages, and since only Fox viewers can participate in that poll (other folks won't see the contact number) it's probably going to show a huge McCain bias. The text aspect is also a distortion which will pull in FOX's younger viewers. Unlike CNN's phone poll which reasonably is a measure of *all* those who viewed the debate, FOX is a measure of how FOX viewers viewed the debate.

82 percent McCain in the FOX poll. Fair? balanced?. More like extremely biased. I can't believe people think this is journalism.

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