Where is the skepticism of selection bias of those 91 historians? I suspect they are cut from the same cloth as who ever decided to give him a Noble Prize before he even took office.
Though kudos for the way you look at the prize.
Certainly I did consider the possibility that C-SPAN intentionally selected the presidential historians surveyed based on a hypothetical C-SPAN pro-Obama bias. But the more I thought about it the less and less it seemed plausible:
First: it would take an enormous amount of dedicated work and effort in advance for C-SPAN to identify
91 presidential historians with the "desired" bias- they would had to research many additional historians (total of hundreds!) as to their prior publications and public positions so as to specifically exclude the "wrong" historians, etc.. All just to generate a survey that C-Span would know in advance was meaningless and fake. Just as a going-away gift to Obama I presume?
Then, and more importantly, I examined the actual rankings.
Ronald Reagan was ranked 9, well above Obama! With Theodore Roosevelt 4, Eisenhower 5, and with Jimmy Carter 26! That hardly looks like a preselected, pro-Democratic, heavily liberal-biased ranking!
Finally, although every visible entity has been accused of political bias at one point or another by one group or another, C-SPAN appears to have been relatively immune to such accusations. It certainly doesn't have a documented history of any such bias.
So yes indeed, I applied my skepticism and reached a different conclusion from what you causally suggested as a possibility (presumably without researching it). Sure it was possible in theory, but turned out not to the the case on more careful examination.
I went even further- given the known reality bias manifested in academia, might 91 historians, even selected randomly, be biased in a liberal direction? Indeed I suspect this is true to some extent (although here again we have the very high ranking of Reagan arguing against it playing an over-riding role in this survey). But if true, then, what we have here is the consensus of 91 presidential historians (each with their own political bias, but each an expert on presidential history) versus the 10 or so anti-Obama posters on the Forum (each with their own political bias and each with a strong opinion on Obama). Fair enough- it all comes down to opinion. But it is an unequal competition, as I see it. And I add that the survey specified the criteria the historians employed to make their rankings, whereas the anti's in this thread have documented their claims so far with unsupported declarations, asides and poor jokes.
