Wednesday, February 25, 2009

What? Me Bias?

Watching MSNBC's "audience reaction" monitor for the president's speech today was like staring at a long mountain range where all of the mountains are square, sit directly next to each other with no space in between, and have very minimal ridges up top.

Seriously. This was their effort to try to copy CNN's tracker during the presidential debates. They had Obama voters and McCain voters putting their reaction to the President's speech, and this was the result for the entire hour:



(red line is McCain supporters, blue line is Obama supporters [they overlap] and yellow line represents the neither approve nor disapprove line)

Those lines almost never moved. And yes, it is "those" lines. You can't tell, but apparently McCain supporters (according to the monitor) are just as high on Obama as the Obama supporters, if not more so, to the point where their approval lines overlapped through the majority of the speech. There was even a point where both Obama and McCain supporters approved of his speech so much, the lines actually cross above the page and disappeared.

I love MSNBC. But wow, they need to at least pretend to get a representative sample. Maybe throw in an actual McCain supporter here and there so that the Republican line is at least occasionally lower than the Democrat line.

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