The Left's Big Blunder
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Two campaigns are being waged right now for the presidency of the United States. No, I'm not talking about the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign. I'm talking about the real-world campaign and the meta-campaign.
The real-world campaign involves speeches and proposals and facts and scandals and political positions and news events. These details, however, are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and have become subsumed by the meta-campaign, which consists of perceptions, polls, reactions, analyses and summations. Until very recently, elections were decided by real-world facts -- but not anymore. Facts and events in and of themselves are no longer important; what's important is how everyone reacts to them. And how do we find out the public's mood concerning this or that incident? Why, the media tells us, that's how.
Or so we've been led to believe.
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A lengthy read, but I highly suggest people focus on the section, "Conformity and the Asch Experiments". I went back to my old college Psych text, and viola--there it was. Zombietime nails it again.
I have a copy of Chris Hitchen's,
No One Left to Lie To. In it he discusses Clinton's "triangulations" and his use of the media and polls not so much as feedback but as SHAPING of events and policies. In this way, as Rush and many other conservative commentators have said over the years, the media and the polls they conduct have no longer been merely REPORTING the news, they have BECOME the news.
And if people bothered to look at the internals of polling going on and look at the oversampling they've done of Democrats, minorities, women, and the under-30 crowd, they'd realize they're being duped.
