Should Joe Scarborough be fired?
02 Nov 2012, 1:34 pm
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XFW8Rf7hQ0[/youtube]
Scarborough's statistical and science innumeracy is laughable. Moron Joe shouldn't be commentating, he should be scrubbing toilets.
02 Nov 2012, 5:15 pm
Maybe he and Dick Morris hang out?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/ ... orris.html
My current favorite posing surrogate, Conor Friedersdorf, actually has a pretty good argument up about the hack and shill problem in the pundit class right now.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... re/264445/
America is filled with people who think its okay to lie, BS, or otherwise misrepresent the truth in order to advance the electoral prospects of a politician or the cause of a governing coalition. Let's call them shills. Other people aren't necessarily aware that they're misrepresenting the truth, but their work is so shaped by what would advance the causes of a candidate or governing coalition that it's often indistinguishable from the shills. We'll call them hacks. In a better world, journalists would be sworn enemies of shills and hacks, and the best are. Unfortunately, the press, especially the political press, has more than its share of shills and hacks.
There are shills and hacks in the polling business too. You'd think that all pollsters would have an incentive to be as accurate as possible. But telling partisans what they want to hear, or telling undecided voters what partisans want them to hear, can be lucrative -- it is widely believed in politics that if enough people say something will happen, there is a better chance of it happening.
And that may be correct.
The actual article is about Nate Silver and his offer to literally put his money where his mouth is and bet money on his political predictions, and how refreshing that is to see someone actually trying to be right rather than push an agenda.
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Jacoby
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02 Nov 2012, 11:28 pm
Cenk is kind of stretching his feigned outrage here. Nate Silver reads polls which are neither infallible or free from bias so right away you're not dealing with 'facts'. I'm not sure what other variables he factors in other than just poll reading but it's not Scarborough hating 'facts' to disagree with his methodology necessarily. There are certain variables to an election that you can't account for thru statistics too. I don't think there is any reason to call him an ideologue however, I don't really even disagree with the 75-80% probability that Obama is going to win but I disagree with the idea that Silver is a merchant in facts, he's a merchant in educated guesses. A 75-80% probability of Obama winning doesn't mean this won't be a close election or that it's in the bag. Probability is kind of a pointless measure as far predicting an election, it's cool if you want to bet on it I guess.
02 Nov 2012, 11:34 pm
Dick Morris actually does have a point when he's talking about how the polls are skewed, the pollsters are using 2008 as the polling model, which is quite frankly insane.
They are taking Raw Data which shows Romney is up and then disproportionally giving Democrats more weight in order to make it look as though Obama is in the lead. Morris is using a model that utilizes the last 4 elections: 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010 and then averaging them out, since it is unlikely that the Democrats will have the same level of intensity that they did in 2008.
Kraichgauer
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03 Nov 2012, 12:58 am
They are taking Raw Data which shows Romney is up and then disproportionally giving Democrats more weight in order to make it look as though Obama is in the lead. Morris is using a model that utilizes the last 4 elections: 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010 and then averaging them out, since it is unlikely that the Democrats will have the same level of intensity that they did in 2008.
Dick Morris is a partisan hacks partisan hack.
But while I think Joe Scarborough is being partisan on the matter of the election, he's still a journalist of note, who had gained invaluable insight on how government works when he had been elected to office. I'm not going to advocate kicking him out on his ass for this.
Morris, though, that's a different story.
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer
03 Nov 2012, 12:05 pm
They are taking Raw Data which shows Romney is up and then disproportionally giving Democrats more weight in order to make it look as though Obama is in the lead. Morris is using a model that utilizes the last 4 elections: 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010 and then averaging them out, since it is unlikely that the Democrats will have the same level of intensity that they did in 2008.
Dick Morris is a partisan hacks partisan hack.
But while I think Joe Scarborough is being partisan on the matter of the election, he's still a journalist of note, who had gained invaluable insight on how government works when he had been elected to office. I'm not going to advocate kicking him out on his ass for this.
Morris, though, that's a different story.
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer
Joe Scarborough probably has more journalistic integrity than anyone else at MSNBC, which quite frankly isn't saying much.
Also as far as Dick Morris, you probably wouldn't be saying what you are about Morris, if he hadn't finally switched parties in disgust (yeah he actually used to be a Democrat).
03 Nov 2012, 12:35 pm
Dick-in-hooker-Morris didn't switch parties over principled disgust, he switched parties over opportunism (namely, letting hookers listen in on executive conversations really burns your bridges in a given party).
It's still comical that such a morally scandalous man is embraced with open arms by the GOP.
Last edited by Master_Pedant on 03 Nov 2012, 12:47 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Kraichgauer
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03 Nov 2012, 12:36 pm
They are taking Raw Data which shows Romney is up and then disproportionally giving Democrats more weight in order to make it look as though Obama is in the lead. Morris is using a model that utilizes the last 4 elections: 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010 and then averaging them out, since it is unlikely that the Democrats will have the same level of intensity that they did in 2008.
Dick Morris is a partisan hacks partisan hack.
But while I think Joe Scarborough is being partisan on the matter of the election, he's still a journalist of note, who had gained invaluable insight on how government works when he had been elected to office. I'm not going to advocate kicking him out on his ass for this.
Morris, though, that's a different story.
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer
Joe Scarborough probably has more journalistic integrity than anyone else at MSNBC, which quite frankly isn't saying much.
Also as far as Dick Morris, you probably wouldn't be saying what you are about Morris, if he hadn't finally switched parties in disgust (yeah he actually used to be a Democrat).
No, Morris had always been a Republican - he just worked personally for Bill Clinton - and is probably responsible for the bad decisions the Clinton White House had made earlier in his first term. Luckily, living up to those strong "family values" Republicans claim to have a corner on, Morris had been forced to resign due to a hooker scandal.
And I'll personally put MSNBC's journalistic integrity up against Fox's any day of the week.
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer
03 Nov 2012, 12:48 pm
Actually Morris was one of the people suggesting Clinton to ignore his other advisors and work with Newt Gingrich to get a balanced budget...
That's not a news channel. That's a propaganda machine, and owner Comcast should probably change Phil Griffin's title from president to high minister of information, or something equally befitting the work of a party propaganist hack in a totalitarian regime. You wonder how mainstream news organizations allow their reporters and corrdespondents to appear in such a cauldron of bias.
I thought show host Sean Hannity of Fox News defined party propagandist. But while his channel was bad, it wasn't as bad-boy biased as MSNBC.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainme ... 6571.story
Kinda bad when even the left-wing Baltimore Sun admits MSNBC is way more partisan than Fox News... I don't buy their argument that Fox News is as biased as what that article is claiming, but I'm glad there are some left-wing Journalists finally understanding that they do have a bias.
03 Nov 2012, 12:55 pm
Kinda bad when even the left-wing Baltimore Sun admits MSNBC is way more partisan than Fox News... I don't buy their argument that Fox News is as biased as what that article is claiming, but I'm glad there are some left-wing Journalists finally understanding that they do have a bias.
You have no idea what a "leftwing paper" is, do you? Well, let me show you a REAL leftwing paper.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
If that's too complicated and "intellectually elitist" for you, than here's another REAL leftwing paper.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/opinion/news-opinion/
03 Nov 2012, 1:14 pm
To be honest, I don't see how skewing poll date is going to help either candidate at the expense of the other when it comes time to vote. If anything, indicating that the race is closer than it really is in swing states helps Obama by discouraging the left from voting for Jill Stein. I don't think it will effect undecided voters at all and few Republicans are going to abstain from voting just because Obama appears to have a small edge in polls. If I was a partisan hack for Obama I'd try to make the polls look as close as possible in the swing states because I know liberals are motivated to vote for Obama out of fear of Romney.
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03 Nov 2012, 1:16 pm
Actually Morris was one of the people suggesting Clinton to ignore his other advisors and work with Newt Gingrich to get a balanced budget...
That's not a news channel. That's a propaganda machine, and owner Comcast should probably change Phil Griffin's title from president to high minister of information, or something equally befitting the work of a party propaganist hack in a totalitarian regime. You wonder how mainstream news organizations allow their reporters and corrdespondents to appear in such a cauldron of bias.
I thought show host Sean Hannity of Fox News defined party propagandist. But while his channel was bad, it wasn't as bad-boy biased as MSNBC.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainme ... 6571.story
Kinda bad when even the left-wing Baltimore Sun admits MSNBC is way more partisan than Fox News... I don't buy their argument that Fox News is as biased as what that article is claiming, but I'm glad there are some left-wing Journalists finally understanding that they do have a bias.
Fox isn't a propaganda machine? Please.
And at least MSNBC treats their viewers with respect. Fox has to showcase bubble headed blondes with their dresses riding ever higher up their thighs to get viewers to watch (not that I have a problem with seeing a lot of thigh - I just think a news network should be able to stand on journalism, not sexual thrills). And no one can deny Fox dumbs down their reporting, out of contempt for their audience. Case in point - the blonde on Fox And Friends, while talking about "Czars" Obama had placed in charge of this or that department, said, "I looked up the word Czar, and it means king!" Seriously? They have that much disrespect for the intelligence of their viewers? Now compare that to the million dollar vocabulary used by Kieth Olbermann, who always regarded his viewers as highly intelligent.
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer
03 Nov 2012, 1:36 pm
Kinda bad when even the left-wing Baltimore Sun admits MSNBC is way more partisan than Fox News... I don't buy their argument that Fox News is as biased as what that article is claiming, but I'm glad there are some left-wing Journalists finally understanding that they do have a bias.
You have no idea what a "leftwing paper" is, do you? Well, let me show you a REAL leftwing paper.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
If that's too complicated and "intellectually elitist" for you, than here's another REAL leftwing paper.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/opinion/news-opinion/
I've actually used the 1st example you gave as a source in the past Master_Pedant, I'm well aware of Guardian's leanings, I'm also aware that you sometimes see more objectivity in the case of Guardian because of the fact it is removed from American Politics due to the fact it is more concerned with British Politics as a British paper..
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03 Nov 2012, 7:42 pm
Thank you for admiting that you watch MSNBC.
Does Fox really have the ditziest women on cable television?
YES!
-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer
