ABC's the Note: No network/AP exit polls for House races on Election Day

[flpoljunkie]

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/TheNote/story?id=156238

Eleven things to remember with three weeks to go:

1. There are no network/AP exit polls in House races on Election Day.

2. As the Washington Post reminds us with numeric precision today, most House Republican candidates in tough races are better funded than their Democratic rivals.

3. Bill Clinton is more popular than George W. Bush and most Republicans don't know why that is.

4. Five people you should assign tails to if you want to know what is actually happening: Sara Taylor, Michael Whouley, Tom Reynolds, Ron Brownstein, and everyone from POS.

5. No one can possibly know how well Big Labor will do in turning out the vote on November 7.

[yourout]

1. My first instinct is to say "shit" but then I realized if they are .....

going to fix the election then the exit polls wont mean diddly like they did in 2004.

[flpoljunkie]

2. Exit polls used to mean something before 2004-still do, except in U.S.

[HereSince1628]

3. They can't steal an election that isn't close.

The folks who fought for the right to live in a democratic republic sacrificed much. It's not so much to ask us to help GOTV.

[wake.up.america]

5. The anger among Democrats is greater than the adoration of those...

who support Bush.

I hope that anger translates into a huge voter turn out.

[Gabi Hayes]

4. if the Note was a piece of paper, I wouldn't wipe my ass with it:

In the spring of 2005, a story came along that was so important, so history-altering that it threatened to revive a killer press instinct that had been dormant for the previous four years. Of course, it helped that it was a Clinton-flavored scandal: That May, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's former campaign finance director, David Rosen, went on trial for his handling of a 2000 fundraiser staged in Hollywood to benefit Clinton's campaign for the U.S. Senate. Rosen was accused of hiding, or underreporting, $800,000 worth of costs. At the time, CNN political editor John Mercurio suggested that Rosen's funny money trial "reminds people of Whitewater" and the "sleazy side of the Clinton administration that and the president are both trying to forget."

Taking the lead in trumpeting the importance of the Rosen trial was ABC's The Note. An inside-baseball daily tip sheet for a readership it has dubbed the "Gang of 500" (politicians, lobbyists, consultants, and journalists who help shape the Beltway's public agenda), The Note is posted online every weekday morning and is widely viewed as the agenda-setter for the political class. On 14 different days between May 2 and 27, The Note posted cumulatively nearly forty links to Rosen-related articles, calling them "must-read." A typical Note entry came on May 10, highlighting "The opening and closing paragraphs in Dick Morris' New York Post column--perfectly explaining why the David Rosen story is going to be with us for a while."



On the day before the Rosen verdict, The Note listed "Waiting for the Rosen verdict" as the number-one priority among the Gang of 500. The next day, a federal jury acquitted Rosen of any wrongdoing. How did The Note handle this news about the trial it had hyped? By ignoring it. The next edition of The Note included a long round-up of must-reads from the Memorial Day weekend. Rosen's not-guilty verdict was not among them.

The abrupt disappearance of the story shouldn't have surprised close readers of The Note, which ABC's website has posted publicly since January 2002. In theory, what drives The Note is anything that's generating Beltway buzz. "We try to channel what the chattering class is chattering about, and to capture the sensibility, ethos, and rituals of the Gang of 500," Mark Halperin, ABC's political director and founder of The Note, once explained. Too often, though, The Note's definition of buzz has been whatever Beltway Republicans are chattering about. The Note has been nourished on an era of total Republican rule. It shows.


.........

more here
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0607.boehlert.html

the above is from a chapter out of LapDogs, by Eric Boehlert, his evisceration of today's corporate media. that was my favorite chapter, in which he unveils The Note as perhaps the most egregious example of smarmy, insider, cool-kid "journalism"

[BurtWorm]

6. They really make no attempt to hide their R bias, do they?

:puke:

[endarkenment]

7. Of course not.

Exit polls are the recognized standard for independent verification of the integrity of election results. Of course they were the first thing that got dropped when the results started to get dubious.

Where is the clue stick?

[Flying Dream Blues]

8. There needs to be an organized protest of this. We aren't living in

some tinpot dictatorship, are we? Are we?