td11 wrote:no rachel maddow and chris hayes are a lot worse than fox and friends or o'reilly or hannity, objectively speaking

ek wrote:Wat is the spread?

mozartpc27 wrote:

td11 wrote:no rachel maddow and chris hayes are a lot worse than fox and friends or o'reilly or hannity, objectively speaking

Someone going on and saying things like "Romney is the devil" or "Obama is Satan" is not really the problem in my eyes. It's the shows that make a claim to objectivity but that are clearly not objective that I have a problem with. I rarely watch either FOX or MSNBC, but my general impression is that MSNBC features a lot of straight opinion shows - host after host coming on to tell us why Republicans will bring the apocalypse upon us, etc. The FOX equivalent is Hannity.

Hannity, while I hate his guts, is not really the guy I have a problem with. He is what he is, doesn't pretend not to be. It's someone like O'Reilly - who tells his audience about how he is an "independent" and he is operating in a "no spin zone" where he's going to ask the tough questions and present the non-partisan TRUTH - and then has Dick Morris the "pollster" on who openly refers to Republicans as "we." It would be on thing if he had Morris on as a partisan strategist, but he doesn't: he presents Morris as a polling and data expert. And so it goes with many of his actually-conservative but pretending-to-be-unbiased-observer guests. When O'Reilly goes out there and defends FOX, he is fond of saying they do "eight hours of hard news a day between 9am-5pm." Watch any of those shows, and you can count all the conservative-slanted stuff that is being touted by O'Reilly as "hard news."

That is far more insidious, and I am unaware of an equivalent on MSNBC, or any MSNBC anchor making equivalent claims. I am sure someone can disabuse me of this notion.

Bloomberg Post-Sandy Backing Gives Obama Unexpected Boost (Bloomberg)

Doll Is Mine wrote:

mozartpc27 wrote:

td11 wrote:no rachel maddow and chris hayes are a lot worse than fox and friends or o'reilly or hannity, objectively speaking

Someone going on and saying things like "Romney is the devil" or "Obama is Satan" is not really the problem in my eyes. It's the shows that make a claim to objectivity but that are clearly not objective that I have a problem with. I rarely watch either FOX or MSNBC, but my general impression is that MSNBC features a lot of straight opinion shows - host after host coming on to tell us why Republicans will bring the apocalypse upon us, etc. The FOX equivalent is Hannity.

Hannity, while I hate his guts, is not really the guy I have a problem with. He is what he is, doesn't pretend not to be. It's someone like O'Reilly - who tells his audience about how he is an "independent" and he is operating in a "no spin zone" where he's going to ask the tough questions and present the non-partisan TRUTH - and then has Dick Morris the "pollster" on who openly refers to Republicans as "we." It would be on thing if he had Morris on as a partisan strategist, but he doesn't: he presents Morris as a polling and data expert. And so it goes with many of his actually-conservative but pretending-to-be-unbiased-observer guests. When O'Reilly goes out there and defends FOX, he is fond of saying they do "eight hours of hard news a day between 9am-5pm." Watch any of those shows, and you can count all the conservative-slanted stuff that is being touted by O'Reilly as "hard news."

That is far more insidious, and I am unaware of an equivalent on MSNBC, or any MSNBC anchor making equivalent claims. I am sure someone can disabuse me of this notion.

Chris Matthews, Al Sharpton, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, or Chris Hayes don't even pretend to be independent or unbiased. I do, however, feel that Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow try to be fair. They will just as easily criticize Obama if they disagree with him. Maddow does so regularly on the war in Afghanistan and drone attacks.

I can't speak on the daytime crew simply because I don't watch their shows regularly although I do know the crew on the Cycle are mostly liberal with the exception of the conservative SE Cupp.

Silver, in 538's methodology section wrote:....we might want to know how the results of particular Senate contests are related to one another, in order to determine for example the likelihood of a party gaining a majority, or a supermajority.

Therefore, the error associated with a forecast is decomposed into local and national components by means of a sum-of-squares formula. For Congressional elections, the ‘national’ component of the error is derived from a historical analysis of generic ballot polls: how accurately the generic ballot forecasts election outcomes, and how much the generic ballot changes between Election Day and the period before Election Day. The local component of the error is then assumed to be the residual of the national error from the sum-of-squares formula, i.e.:



The local and national components of the error calculation are then randomly generated (according to a normal distribution) over the course of 100,000 simulation runs. In each simulation run, the degree of national movement is assumed to be the same for all candidates: for instance, all the Republican candidates might receive a 3-point bonus in one simulation, or all the Democrats a 4-point bonus in another. The local error component, meanwhile, is calculated separately for each individual candidate or state. In this way, we avoid the misleading assumption that the results of each election are uncorrelated with one another.

gr wrote:
Also, I ran into the Romney canvassers on my route and got the one girl's phone number. She was also from DC, of course.