[SfN] One more thought on polls (not for younger viewers)

[Arthur Cronkhite]

That's it!
Brilliant!
Absolutely!
Its media masturbation.
The polls become the news and the news becomes the polls, that's why they do
it!

It saves the media from having to deal with real relationships, which in
this case is getting off their duff and talking to real people about real
issues. They simply share each others excitement and report back on the
new-news of the little things in the news they just did with each other and
themselves.

Its a circle with each helping the other achieve a higher level of mine is
bigger than yours and didn't that feel good. In turn it drives the voyeurs
crazy and makes them watch even more to see who will be on top next.

While all of this is happening, the folks at the head of the train continue
dumping more money into the media circle which keeps it going round. At the
same time, the megacorp politica waddles around seductively asking, does
anybody need some money lotion?

Personally I could care less about polls in elections, because at the end of
the day (election day) they really don't matter.

Arthur Cronkhite

"Any man willing to give up any part of his liberty for a false sense of
safety deserves neither." - Benjamin Franklin


-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Riismandel <p-riism at uiuc.edu>
To: nader-uiuc at lists.groogroo.com <nader-uiuc at lists.groogroo.com>;
prairiegreens at lists.groogroo.com <prairiegreens at lists.groogroo.com>
Date: Tuesday, October 24, 2000 12:43 AM
Subject: [Prairiegreens] One more thought on polls


>One thing to think about is that when you really invest yourself in
>considering, voting and even acting for a third party you not only have to
>question and reconsider the mainstream ideology of the two-party system,
>but you also have to question and reconsider the tools that help perpetuate
>that ideology.
>
>Think about it -- who are the polls for?  Are these polls there to educate
>the citizen voter?  What possible service do polls do for us?
>
>Realistically, not much at all.  Sure it might be nice to get a sense of
>how people are thinking, but how many polls are necessary to do this?  Two,
>six, ten?  A week?
>
>The polls serve two primary purposes.  First, they serve the needs of the
>major party candidates--polls give them some "objective" data they can
>worry about and concentrate on, rather than probing deeper or worrying
>about something substantial.
>
>Secondly--and this accounts for the sheer quantity of polls--they serve the
>purpose of the mainstream media  because polls become the news.  It's rich,
>relatively cheap and reliable content.  When else can Time magazine report
>on itself legitimately except when it conducts a poll.  Instead of doing
>costly investigative journalism on the candidates that might uncover their
>past misdeeds and positions (that would require paying a reporter to work
>for weeks or months on just one or two stories), the major networks,
>newspapers and magazines just conduct a new poll, and so the changes in the
>poll that week become the story.  Whether or not ANYTHING really happened.
>
>  And, of course, neither of the candidates can get too pissed off about
>the polls since they're "objective data" about the voters.  But how pissed
>would Al and the Dems be if NBC made Jeffrey St. Clair and Alex Cockburn a
>lead story on the nightly news?  GE/NBC has no need to rock the boat that
much.
>
>So while it is easy and very tempting to take the polls seriously, and to
>let them either convince us that Ralph is doing well or to scare us into
>worrying that "gee, maybe I am contributing to the election of a fascist
>Bush regime,"  you just simply have to remind yourself that doing so is
>simply falling back into a pattern and mode of thought that you're
>attempting to resist in the first place.
>
>The only polls that matter are the real ones on election day.
>
>--Paul
>
>
>
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