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Merged The election was stolen/rigged!

Funny how the GOP are not parading this withnesss around the US media
 
Rich_C said:
There were people in Arlington still in line to vote at 10 pm election night. Which would cause the precinct to report later.
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I worked as an election officer in Fairfax, and we didn't get the votes counted and everything filled out and put away until 9 even though the last voter voted a couple minutes before the polls closed. And then the chief had to drive the electronic records and the paper records to the county offices to be counted along with a couple hundred other chiefs. My precinct's results may not have been entered into the computer until well after midnight. Hell, they couldn't have been entered before 10 pm.

It's that way every election and anybody who watches Virginia elections knows to wait to see what the northern counties report. The Republican builds up an early lead as the small rural counties report in, then both parties wait to see if the Democrats run up a large enough margin in the heavily populated areas to make up the difference. In 2009 they didn't. In 2008 and 2012 they did.
 
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Robert Prey said:
The Pew Media Center reports:

One week before the election, MSNBC broadcast 51% of stories on Obama were positive with zero negative stories.

On the other hand, 68% of stories on Romney were negative, with no positive stores.

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels would approve.

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser...o-networks-leading-up-to-election-day_b155747
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ftfy

of course Goebbels did not have a competing network doing the exact opposite now did he?

So much for this being an example of election fraud.
 
Robert Prey said:
The Pew Media Center reports...
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And this pertains exactly how to your accusation of electoral fraud? From your link: "Ultimately it isn’t clear whether the coverage had any impact on the outcome of the election."

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbles would approve.
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That reference and judgment is not in the article you cite, so I assume your irrelevant, misspelled invocation of Nazi Germany is just meant to be mean-spirited. If you were less obviously extremist and biased, you might almost be credible.
 
Robert Prey said:
The Pew Media Center reports:

One week before the election, MSNBC broadcast 51% of stories on Obama were positive with zero negative stories.

On the other hand, 68% of stories on Romney were negative, with no positive stores.

Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbles would approve.

http://www.mediabistro.com/tvnewser...o-networks-leading-up-to-election-day_b155747
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Hey Robert, do you read what you post?

"On Fox News, 56% of stories about President Obama were negative, with only 5% positive.."
 
Straw Man said:
Hey Robert, do you read what you post?

"On Fox News, 56% of stories about President Obama were negative, with only 5% positive.."
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I think someone's math is too weak, if it really said that.
 
Mudcat said:
I think someone's math is too weak, if it really said that.
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I'm guessing the remaining stories were judged to be neutral, though of course that just begs the question what sort of objective measures were used to make those judgements?
 
Also even if the evidence suggests that the bulk of the media supported Obama so what? As I understand it US broadcasters are under no obligation to be impartial and if those who run them chose to slant their coverage in favour of Obama because they supported his policies or just thought Romney would be a disaster isn't that just the Republicans tough luck?
 
Actually, it's not the bulk of the media. Robert chose to cherry-pick what he wanted from the article. Fox were far more critical of President Obama and more positive for Romney.
 
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Garrison said:
I'm guessing the remaining stories were judged to be neutral...
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Essentially yes. If you keep clicking and reading, you'll eventually discover their methodology. By the way, Pew is a legitimate research group.

For the Fox News data, 5% and 56% are the percentages of total articles in a sample that were deemed to have a tone, for a total of 61% of the Fox News articles. The rest were deemed not to have a tone.

...though of course that just begs the question what sort of objective measures were used to make those judgements?
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No objective measures, but guided and aggregated subjective measures. Hence ultimately it will be someone's opinion whether an article has a "tone" or not.

For each news item, a judge categorizes all the assertions it contains according to positive, negative, or neutral effect on the candidate. Neutral assertions are discarded. If the polarized assertions that remain achieve at least a 60-40 proportion, the item as a whole is deemed to have a tone corresponding to the majority. Scores from an unknown number of judges working separately are aggregated.

It is about as objective as research of this type can get. Any research that requires human judgment can achieve rigor and reproducibility only by aggregating votes from a reasonable cross section of human judges, and then only to within some statistical margin.

And yes, Robert cherry-picked the data. The overall findings of the paper identified positive and negative coverage for both candidates. The key finding was the polarization, not that the media overwhelmingly favored Obama.
 
Indeed the story does begin with
"A new Pew study looking at media coverage leading up to election day indicates that President Obama received far more positive coverage than negative coverage, and that Mitt Romney received far more negative coverage than positive coverage. On cable news, however, things were a bit more extreme." which is the reporter's take on the study.

This is probably due to this passage in the Pew article itself
But in the final week, a bigger discrepancy was seen as Obama was a significant presence in 80% of the coverage, and Romney was a significant presence in 62%.

The data suggest two major factors in Obama's increased and improved coverage in the final week of the campaign. One was the increase in amount of attention paid to the horse-race components of the race, which showed Obama with key advantages late in the race. During the final week, 46% of all press coverage of the campaign focused on horse-race and strategy stories, larger than the 39% that was devoted to such issues throughout the entire race.

And in those horse-race stories of the final week, Obama did particularly well. Fully 37% of the horse-race stories including Obama were positive while only 16% were negative, a net plus of 21 points. For Romney that week, 20% of those stories were positive compared to 29% negative, a net minus of 9 points.
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Was this due to MSNBC alone? Of course not. In fact if one looks at Fox's stats one sees that the number of negative Romney stories in the final week is double that of the number of Obama positive stories. This from the network that is so slanted Republican itself.

One major difference between MSNBC and FOX wrt to the favoured candidates, IMHO, is that Republicans had great reservations concerning Romney, his Mormon religion for one. While some Republicans still believe that Obama is a Muslim, this same subset would also consider Mormonism to be a cult and in more moderate Christian subsets the knowledge that Obama IS a Christian (if perhaps lax in the faith) this subset would also have reservations about Mormonism.

While this obviously would not drive extremists to vote Obama it would contribute to less incentive to vote at all in this group. Among more moderate Republican though it could actually have driven some to vote for Obama rather than take a flyer on a man who's religion they are suspicious of.

Of course the Republican primaries really did not help Romney either and the very same negative stories that doged him during the primaries were part of the push by Democrats during the last week.

Romney/Ryan really did not help matters themselves when they attacked Obama for 'choosing winners and losers' when a simple comparison showed that Bain Capital had a worse record of doing exactly that and the gist of which was part of the primaries attack on Romney!

Our resident right wing extremist in this thread himself does not like Romney. Not sure if Robert stated whether or not he cast a ballot.


ETA: at least Robert is coming close to quoting valid research now, though in this case he chose to quote an article about the research rather than the summary from the people who actually DID the research.
Of course its tangentially related, at best, to the OP and has zero to do with the actual voting.
In fact if the neg/pos news story ratio did substantially contribute to the Obama win then that simply confirms that the election results were on the up and up.
 
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Garrison said:
Also even if the evidence suggests that the bulk of the media supported Obama so what? As I understand it US broadcasters are under no obligation to be impartial and if those who run them chose to slant their coverage in favour of Obama because they supported his policies or just thought Romney would be a disaster isn't that just the Republicans tough luck?
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It's not a matter of law but one of journalistic ethics. It's one thing to have opinion, quite another to taint and spin the news in one direction. That's dishonest.
 
Robert Prey said:
It's not a matter of law but one of journalistic ethics. It's one thing to have opinion, quite another to taint and spin the news in one direction. That's dishonest.
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I guess you don't have any problem with Fox News doing that, do you?

I know you have no problem at all with the amount of spin and taint in WND.
 
So Fox news and WND are exemplars of spin and bias free news in the land of fantasy now.
 
Robert Prey said:
It's not a matter of law but one of journalistic ethics. It's one thing to have opinion, quite another to taint and spin the news in one direction. That's dishonest.
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Robert, journalists have been doing that since Ugg told Ogg what the Neanderthals three caves down were doing. That's the human condition.

If you need examples of biased media - Mr. Hearst's newspaper chain from last century is a good one. Here in Ottawa the Ottawa Citizen and the Ottawa Union owners held to different political views, and, well here is a clip from the article for context and what happened:

"Such attention had its drawbacks. A public
practice drew swarms of youngsters. Turner
recognized the potential dangers; he sent men
out to keep spectators clear of the intended range
and repeatedly issued warnings that stray
ordnance spotted by children should not be
touched, or if handled should be brought back
to the Battery. In March 1863, however, a boy
retrieved an unexploded shell on the Ottawa
River ice and took it back to a city blacksmith.
The tradesman (whose ignorance must have been
appalling) put the shell in his fire and began
applying his bellows. Seconds later a
tremendous explosion wrecked the shop;
miraculously, none of the five people present
were injured.
There followed one of those curious literary
duels that characterized 19th century
journalism. The Ottawa Citizen, dubbing Turner
"the Battery-man," accused him of negligence;
Turner furiously defended himself against the
charge in letters printed in the Ottawa Union;
neither paper printed the opponent's case, and
anyone trying to make sense of the exchange
would have to buy both papers. Among other
things he declared that the children who
frequented these "shoots" had often been warned
not to touch unexploded ordnance but that the
urchins repeatedly picked up fragments and shot
for sale to local ironmongers.
The issue was hotly argued. Unhappily, early
in the correspondence, Turner expressed himself
poorly, writing that "The boys who will run about
whenever the battery is at practice have been
warned over and over again not to touch any
shells that they may pick up, but to bring them
to the Battery." The Citizen seized upon this
poor turn of phrase and repeatedly mocked
Turner for supposedly believing that people
could pick things up without touching them. His
contorted prose (rare for Turner) was repeatedly
quoted back, fully italicised to demonstrate its
contradictions. The paper ignored his later
clarification; he had meant that people finding
shells should not tamper with them but bring
them to the gunners (itself rather dubious
advice)."

The whole article is attached.

I was always taught that removing bias from what you write is impossible, but it is possible to recognize your own biases, the biases of your sources and to reduce the effect that those have on your writings.
 

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