Bungalow Bill wrote:Before that unfortunate interruption, I gave a brief recap of TN columnist LeRoy Goldman's
(aka The Shadow) almost total screw-up on his election day predictions.
LeRoy Goldman, wrong on presidential election, wrong on Senate elections, wrong for America.
I took a quick look at the Henderson Lightning site, where Bill Moss predicts a Romney win. Wrong.
These folks have to get out of Henderson county once in a while.
I can explain it. He, like almost all political pundits on the right, had his head firmly planted up his ass.
Let's take a look at who's wrong and who's right.
Right: Nate Silver, NYT, Huffington Post, Politico, and ABC News.
Nate Silver said the most likely scenario was Obama winning 332 electoral votes.
Guess who got 332 electoral votes. Obama.
Guess who ridiculed Nate Silver. The conservative misleadia.
Embarrassingly Wrong: Rush Limbaugh, Fox, Dick Morris, Michael Barrone, Karl Rove, Ann Coulter, George Will, Jennifer Rubin, Peggy Noonan, . . . in other words, all the gods and goddesses of the conservative world.
It seems that reality has a liberal bias.
How did they get it so wrong? Because they're all in a race to see who can be the most inaccurate, most biased, most misinformed, and, in turn, they're in a contest to see who can most misinform their viewership.
Ratings.
If conservatives were smart, they would demand more accurate media instead of the misleadia they get. Then they wouldn't keep embarrassing themselves by being so easily fooled.
Instead, they are intellectually lazy and just chug whatever Kool Aid comes their way . . . because it sounds good. Because it's what they want to hear. Because it's easier to JUST BELIEVE than to think.
Conservatives were at a disadvantage because their information elites pandered in the most cynical, self-defeating ways, treating would-be candidates like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain as if they were plausible presidents rather than national jokes who'd lose worse than George McGovern.
How many months were wasted on them?
How many hours of Glenn Beck conspiracy theories did Fox News broadcast to its viewers? How many hours of transparently mindless Sean Hannity content is still broadcast daily? Why don't Americans trust Republicans on foreign policy as they once did? In part because conservatism hasn't grappled with the foreign-policy failures of George W. Bush. A conspiracy of silence surrounds the subject. Romney could neither run on the man's record nor repudiate it. ...
I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there's no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it's often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.
On the biggest political story of the year, the conservative media just got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media. And movement conservatives, who believe the MSM is more biased and less rigorous than their alternatives, have no way to explain how their trusted outlets got it wrong, while the New York Times got it right. Hint: The Times hired the most rigorous forecaster it could find.
It ought to be an eye-opening moment.
But I expect that it'll be quickly forgotten, that none of the conservatives who touted a polling conspiracy will be discredited, and that the right will continue to operate at an information disadvantage. After all, it's not like they'll trust the analysis of a non-conservative like me more than the numerous fellow conservatives who constantly tell them things that turn out not to be true.
LINK
It should be a wakeup call for conservatives to abandon their misleadia and demand accurate news and analysis, but I'm afraid it won't be. They're hooked on the mollycoddling and spoon-feeding and sippy cups full of Kool Aid.
They'd rather hear what they want to hear than hear the truth.
The main reason they hate the mainstream media so much is that the mainstream media gets it right.
