I recieved an email from Dru Sefton, The Bloggers Did It!

[AnIndependentTexan]

posted at commongroundcommonsense by Dogday

http://commongroundcommonsense.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=294

Ms. Dru Sefton

National Correspondent

Newhouse News Service

Washington, D.C.

[phone]

Who am I? http://www.newhouse.com/sefton.html

I wrote to over 300 news sources thanks to a post earlier today and this is the only one who responded.

Here is what she said:

PLEASE don’t tell the media we’re “not doing” our jobs when we are.
The bloggers who released the flawed, preliminary data are who you should be blaming.

I said

What Bloggers? Do you know the percentage of 10 exit polls being wrong in one election? It is unheard of. These things are coming to light. We need to move this country to the "I want to hold my vote" campaign. It will be the only way people in this country will be sure. We get a receipt at the store, gas station etc, why not for our vote. Is our vote not important enough?

Then she emailed me back:

No, what I’m saying is, the bloggers jumped on the early exit polls without putting them into any context, forcing the mainstream media to also go with the numbers. Had the bloggers known that the early polls were artificially weighted heavily by gender, thus incorrect, they would have understood NOT to let the public see the numbers.



Here’s what I’m talking about



Washingtonpost.com


November 3, 2004 Wednesday 10:39 AM


SECTION: TECHNOLOGY

LENGTH: 2857 words

HEADLINE: Bloggers Let Poll Cat Out of the Bag

SOURCE: washingtonpost.com

BYLINE: Cynthia L. Webb, washingtonpost.com Staff Writer

HIGHLIGHT:
Web logs shook up the mainstream media Tuesday by providing an early look at exit polls, proving once and for all their influence not only in the coverage of politics but perhaps in the electoral process itself.

BODY:
In the thick of a historic and obsessively watched Election Day, bloggers shook up the mainstream media by providing an early look at election exit polls, proving once and for all their influence not only in the coverage of politics but perhaps in the electoral process itself.

The early-afternoon posts of the numbers -- purportedly based on the data that media organizations get from people who have actually voted, which the media then use to predict outcomes and make correlations between votes and issues -- indicated bad news for President Bush, stoking early-afternoon chatter that grew to a roar and sparked a stock market sell-off.

Never mind that the posts were at times thinly sourced or turned out to be flat wrong. As the networks and other media standbys played it safe, people flocked to blogs to get a glimpse at early polling data and early calls. The traffic alone further boosted the street cred of blogs. The National Review's Corner, Daily Kos, Drudge Report and Wonkette.com were among those out of the box early with the data.

"Politically oriented Web logs began posting leaked exit poll data early yesterday afternoon, influencing media coverage of the race and underscoring the new medium's continued emergence as an opinion-shaper," the Wall Street Journal said. "The willingness of the individuals who run the Internet sites, known as blogs, to post the data as soon as they could obtain them -- by whatever means -- gave them a leg up on the nation's mainstream news organizations, which were bound by their own restrictions on disseminating exit-poll information. But the uncertain outcome of the election late into the night underscored how the high-profile new medium could ultimately prove vulnerable to the same gaffes that bedeviled the mainstream media four years ago."


I have written her back asking how multi-billion dollars media corps would base their information on bloggers was in essense stupid and she still won't acknowledge that the exit polls only being wrong in swing states is a problem.

[KharmaTrain]

1. Ask Her If Her Paper Did Exit Polling...

Hindsight in the media is 20/20 ain't it.

Bloggers didn't set up exit polling services, corporations like the one that owns her paper did. Whose jiving who here?

And while you're at it, ask her how the exit polling also jived with a lot of the "on the ground reports" this place and other sites were getting about early heavy turnout...and how all this data along with the many pre-election polls that agreed with what we were seeing was all wrong? Maybe there's something else here that she could be investigating...ya know, being a journalist, not a critic.