Something else I have been saying for some time.
Last week, at the top of the front page of The New York Times, came the startling headline: “Poll Indicates Economic Fears Hurting Obama.”*
Who wudda thought? That may be news for anyone who hasn’t been living on planet Earth for the past several years, but for the rest of us – do we really need another poll to tell us that the bad economy is not good news for Obama? The finding is about as newsworthy as, say, “Poll Finds Paint Doesn’t Dry Well in Wet Weather.”
It’s not that I don’t value polls giving us updates about the latest mental gyrations in the electorate, but unfortunately The New York Times has blinders on when it comes to polls – only theirs are worth mentioning.
While the Times tells us, for example, that this is the first time since the primaries that Romney has an edge over Obama (leading the president by one percentage point), other polls tell a different story. Gallup had Romney up by two points in June and Rasmussen had him up by four points about the same time period. But the Times didn’t see fit to acknowledge those results.
Of course, still other polls in June showed Obama ahead, by anywhere from one to thirteen points (also not mentioned by the Times). The issue is not that polls conflict, but that the Times (as well as other media organizations with their own polls) treat only their polls as news and weave long anecdotal explanations for their results – even as other media polls show contradictory results. Fox, for example, showed Obama leading by four points over virtually the same time period as the latest CBS/NYT poll, undercutting the Times’ analysis that Romney was ahead for the first time since the primaries.
When it comes to covering the beat of public opinion, even for such an august publication as The New York Times, normal journalistic standards take a beating. It’s not “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” but “Only the Polls That We Conduct.”
This practice means that these media organizations are essentially creating news rather than reporting it.
This wasn’t supposed to happen until Nov. 7: It’s like the last act of Titus Andronicus over at GM corporate headquarters.
Two weeks ago, Opel chief Karl-Friedrich Stracke presented numbers to Dan Akerson. Akerson fires him. Opel gets two interim chiefs in a week. Last Thursday, Opel’s new design chief Dave Lyon doesn’t even start his job. Today, media in the U.S. and Germany report that Lyon had been escorted from the building and to a waiting car by GM’s head of personnel. A day later, global marketing chief Joel Ewanick suddenly leaves. Instead of wishing him all the best for his future endeavors, GM spokesman Greg Martin puts a knife in Ewanick’s back: “He failed to meet the expectations the company has of an employee.”
I’m having trouble understanding all this. I’ve been told that after its Rattnerized bailout GM is “back,” a dramatic ”success story.” The president himself has boasted “General Motors is back on top.” Yet now a few weeks later Bloomberg says the company is in a “slump”–it’s right there, in the headline: “slump.” How can the bailed out, comebacked, turned around success story GM be in a slump when the U.S. auto market as a whole is growing rapidly? It’s almost as if an easily spun media wildly underestimated the problems at GM (and the inadequacy of the administration’s fixes) in a way that helped President Obama’s favored narrative (and pleased a major advertiser at the same time!) …
P.S.: Why is all this executive turmoil happening now? It’s very hard for an outsider to know exactly what is going on, but there are three theories. 1) GM CEO Akerson is panicking (Truth About Cars’theory); 2) Akerson is kind of incompetent and hires people he then chases away or has to fire; 3) … I’m thinking of a third. … What’s the third? I know there’s a third. …
P.P.S.: I’d forgotten that in April, 2010 President Obama told the nation (in his weekly radio address)
“It won’t be too long before the stock the Treasury is holding in GM could be sold ….”
