Two immediate thoughts - remember that the media constantly describe Joe Manchin as moderate, so a "moderate voter" in a focus group is likely right of center. And the despicable Frank Luntz uses focus groups for political branding. He's the guy who coined "illegal immigrant," and "death tax" to help Republicans spread their bile. When the despicable Eric Cantor lost a primary to a Tea Party nutcase, Luntz spent 5 minutes on CBS' morning show claiming the election result was AWFUL for America without bothering to disclose that he had been working for Cantor. Starting with Newt's contract on America, Luntz has been poisoning the national discourse for years, which is why it was laughable over the past couple of years when he would go on TV and feign an inability to understand how Trump made it to the White House.
This is off topic but relevant to the media's handling of polls, and I need to vent. I was incensed earlier this week to hear an NPR reporter cite a poll of Russians' attitudes about Putin's buildup to invading Ukraine. The reporter said 60% of Russians support what Putin is doing. Never mentioned who conducted the poll, including how many people responded. Or the fact that Russians neither have freedom of speech or a free press and face reprisals for speaking out against the government.
For good measure the reporter threw in a comment that Biden is "struggling" to deal with the Ukranian issue, the pandemic, inflation, and so on. Am I "struggling" when I'm trying to fix a leaky faucet or merely working to fix it? All of this, including using focus groups to gauge voter sentiment, is embarrassing and pathetic. As Gore Vidal once said: "At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice."
Does the press care of the focus group is insightful or does it only care that it can make those who are not paying close attention think it is insightful? I vote for the latter. When I read (or tried to plow thru) the NYT article, all I could think was that "these people are not independents, these people are Republicans who know the brand is toxic so choose to call themselves independent." and the presence of the odious Frank Luntz was the dead giveaway. Face it folks, we have entered the era of normalizing the insurrection, bashing Biden, and preparing for the triumphal return of Republicans to their proper place running the country (into the ground). It is so much easier for the elite access stenographers of the Beltway Press Corp to repeat GOP talking points than to do their jobs properly. After all, that is what made most of them rich.
As always, it's about creating controversies where they don't exist, attracting viewers and scoring those high ratings. I personally have no interest in TV news shows, and no interest in what other voters think of Joe Biden. But knowing how people so easily influence each other, these phony focus groups bother the hell out of me. They're not news, they are phony "infotainment" and do not enlighten or educate viewers. But this is what passes for political journalism today. No wonder Trump's mostly silent. With the press piling on Biden, Trump can go play golf and trust that his reelection campaign is running itself.
The obsession around these "moderate" undecided voters stems in my opinion from the idea the media has that it has found the hack for election analysis. The Presidential election boils down to a group of swing states and in those swing states there are a group of swing voters. Thus all other voices can be ignored since they have found the magic key to the election. I really wish they would spend more time interrogating the notion of democracy rather than accepting GOP agitprop that the Electoral College is "What The Founders Intended" and therefore cannot be questioned. It seem likely that any GOP candidate but especially Trump, would likely only be able to win a bare EC victory and a substantial popular vote defeat. Yet rarely is the notion of minority rule questioned in terms of what it means for the majority of citizens.
Frank Luntz has pulled the strings behind the scenes for years. A few months ago, I listened to an interview between Luntz and Andy Slavitt where Luntz was bemoaning the rampant misinformation about Covid and vaccinations, and urging 'compassion and love' to counter the divisions. This tripe from a man who spent his life undermining democracy by promoting unfettered capitalism and raw power grabs through deceptive branding and misinformation. Almost a million deaths later, and nothing has changed...he's back to undermining democracy. With few exceptions, the media are 1) failing to explain the reality of daily life under authoritarian regimes, 2) failing to explain the phenomenon of worldwide inflation, 3) failing to explain why Russia's actions are imperiling the post WWII world order (and why Trump's pandering to Putin opened the door to this perilous moment), and 4) the destruction that will be wrought by a GOP majority Congress in 2023 (endless vengeance, chaos, further crippling if the rule of law, further rollback of regulations protecting air/water/food/worker's rights.
Eric, first I wanted to thank you for being the lone voice of sanity on Biden's press coverage. Having dedicated 2019-2020 to his campaign as a volunteer & this past year hoping to help unwind Jan 6 via a sedition hunters groups, it is beyond me why MSM is pushing such dangerous & misleading rhetoric.
I was wondering if you have any suggestions re: what we can do as media consumers to fight this trend ? I currently subscribe to a number of National publications -- what is the best way to vocalize how dangerous I feel this all is and be heard. Any thoughts ?
Clearly these groups were deliberately skewed to hype the dishonest storyline that Biden is failing. Poll numbers tell a different tale. Biden’s performance is approved by 75% of Democrats and by a majority of those who lean Democratic.
The media is deliberately framing that story as “Biden’s approval ratings among Dems has tanked ” — it is true his numbers are down 20 points but that is deeply misleading because they have dropped from an unusually high 95% approval among Dems.
These focus groups are blatantly biased. If they had been chosen by objective standards intended to give viewers real insight into how Americans are thinking then 3/4 of the Democrats would have had positive things to say about Biden.
Our media has allowed itself to become an arm of the right wing propaganda machine. The fact that they would use the odious right wing spinner Frank Luntz is proof. He used to do this regularly for NBC with little criticism. Those same networks would never choose someone like James Carville to do the questioning.
That the New York Times hired Frank Luntz to do anything other than mop floors is a testament to how low the Old Gray Lady has stooped to perpetuate her own lazy and false narratives about Biden.
Luntz was, after all, the guy who organized the non-governing obstruction policy of the GOP on the evening of January 20, 2009 at The Caucus Room steakhouse where they all agreed that the best way to deal with Obama/Biden was to oppose and try to tank everything they proposed, even if they agreed with it, or caused the very messes Obama/Biden inherited, their oaths office be damned.
"Looking for additional ways to pile on President Joe Biden...". Sorry to say, made me laugh.
Anyway.
As Eric made clear but could have made a bit clearer, focus groups are insanely manipulatable. As a rule there is no justification for reporting on one, even less than that for a hard news operation to run one. Too, not like there aren't better, more important things to report were our awesome, exceptional mainstream interested in doing: Accurate reporting on the Biden economy, maybe fact-based reporting on Ukraine instead of just reporting what the Blob wants reported (too little of which is true). But we get focused groups.
Essentially what they're doing is running a poll, but everyone knows that a poll with 10 people in it is worthless, so they call it something else. The polls aren't telling them what they want to hear, so they just make smaller and smaller ones.
Thank you for shining a light on the obvious reality that these focus groups are just more right wing garbage. We live in a world where media consolidation and takeover by the insanely rich who benefit from GOP policy are reporting “the news” snipped, manipulated and focused to represent their big money interests. I’m ever grateful for independent journalists who really live the WaPo tagline “Democracy Dies in the Dark”
On a lighter note, this reminded me of an SNL skit that I was thinking was a focus group but it was a taste test. If you need a laugh, go to YouTube and search SNL Taste Test. Brings me tears every time.
Thank you for keeping tabs on the Press. I blog on Medium. My latest was titled "Will Journalism Save Our Democracy?" Sadly, I concluded, no. I gave you a mention in the piece. I monitor CNN's web site and have probably sent them 25 emails the past several months. Early this week they blared in the upper left lead that the crashing stock market was a big problem for Biden. By the end of the day, the market had fully recovered. Follow up story? What follow up story? Today we learned the our annual economy grew by 5.7%. Yet, no big lead on the CNN site, just a small story on the site's far right, and it was tied to the market being up because of a strong economic report. One of my blog's readers responded by turned my question on its ear. "Will Democracy Survive Journalism?"
Two immediate thoughts - remember that the media constantly describe Joe Manchin as moderate, so a "moderate voter" in a focus group is likely right of center. And the despicable Frank Luntz uses focus groups for political branding. He's the guy who coined "illegal immigrant," and "death tax" to help Republicans spread their bile. When the despicable Eric Cantor lost a primary to a Tea Party nutcase, Luntz spent 5 minutes on CBS' morning show claiming the election result was AWFUL for America without bothering to disclose that he had been working for Cantor. Starting with Newt's contract on America, Luntz has been poisoning the national discourse for years, which is why it was laughable over the past couple of years when he would go on TV and feign an inability to understand how Trump made it to the White House.
This is off topic but relevant to the media's handling of polls, and I need to vent. I was incensed earlier this week to hear an NPR reporter cite a poll of Russians' attitudes about Putin's buildup to invading Ukraine. The reporter said 60% of Russians support what Putin is doing. Never mentioned who conducted the poll, including how many people responded. Or the fact that Russians neither have freedom of speech or a free press and face reprisals for speaking out against the government.
For good measure the reporter threw in a comment that Biden is "struggling" to deal with the Ukranian issue, the pandemic, inflation, and so on. Am I "struggling" when I'm trying to fix a leaky faucet or merely working to fix it? All of this, including using focus groups to gauge voter sentiment, is embarrassing and pathetic. As Gore Vidal once said: "At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice."
Pro-tip: Anytime you see the words “Frank Luntz” and “focus group” hold onto your seats, you are about to be lied to.
Does the press care of the focus group is insightful or does it only care that it can make those who are not paying close attention think it is insightful? I vote for the latter. When I read (or tried to plow thru) the NYT article, all I could think was that "these people are not independents, these people are Republicans who know the brand is toxic so choose to call themselves independent." and the presence of the odious Frank Luntz was the dead giveaway. Face it folks, we have entered the era of normalizing the insurrection, bashing Biden, and preparing for the triumphal return of Republicans to their proper place running the country (into the ground). It is so much easier for the elite access stenographers of the Beltway Press Corp to repeat GOP talking points than to do their jobs properly. After all, that is what made most of them rich.
As always, it's about creating controversies where they don't exist, attracting viewers and scoring those high ratings. I personally have no interest in TV news shows, and no interest in what other voters think of Joe Biden. But knowing how people so easily influence each other, these phony focus groups bother the hell out of me. They're not news, they are phony "infotainment" and do not enlighten or educate viewers. But this is what passes for political journalism today. No wonder Trump's mostly silent. With the press piling on Biden, Trump can go play golf and trust that his reelection campaign is running itself.
The obsession around these "moderate" undecided voters stems in my opinion from the idea the media has that it has found the hack for election analysis. The Presidential election boils down to a group of swing states and in those swing states there are a group of swing voters. Thus all other voices can be ignored since they have found the magic key to the election. I really wish they would spend more time interrogating the notion of democracy rather than accepting GOP agitprop that the Electoral College is "What The Founders Intended" and therefore cannot be questioned. It seem likely that any GOP candidate but especially Trump, would likely only be able to win a bare EC victory and a substantial popular vote defeat. Yet rarely is the notion of minority rule questioned in terms of what it means for the majority of citizens.
Frank Luntz has pulled the strings behind the scenes for years. A few months ago, I listened to an interview between Luntz and Andy Slavitt where Luntz was bemoaning the rampant misinformation about Covid and vaccinations, and urging 'compassion and love' to counter the divisions. This tripe from a man who spent his life undermining democracy by promoting unfettered capitalism and raw power grabs through deceptive branding and misinformation. Almost a million deaths later, and nothing has changed...he's back to undermining democracy. With few exceptions, the media are 1) failing to explain the reality of daily life under authoritarian regimes, 2) failing to explain the phenomenon of worldwide inflation, 3) failing to explain why Russia's actions are imperiling the post WWII world order (and why Trump's pandering to Putin opened the door to this perilous moment), and 4) the destruction that will be wrought by a GOP majority Congress in 2023 (endless vengeance, chaos, further crippling if the rule of law, further rollback of regulations protecting air/water/food/worker's rights.
Eric, first I wanted to thank you for being the lone voice of sanity on Biden's press coverage. Having dedicated 2019-2020 to his campaign as a volunteer & this past year hoping to help unwind Jan 6 via a sedition hunters groups, it is beyond me why MSM is pushing such dangerous & misleading rhetoric.
I was wondering if you have any suggestions re: what we can do as media consumers to fight this trend ? I currently subscribe to a number of National publications -- what is the best way to vocalize how dangerous I feel this all is and be heard. Any thoughts ?
Clearly these groups were deliberately skewed to hype the dishonest storyline that Biden is failing. Poll numbers tell a different tale. Biden’s performance is approved by 75% of Democrats and by a majority of those who lean Democratic.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/01/25/views-of-joe-biden/
The media is deliberately framing that story as “Biden’s approval ratings among Dems has tanked ” — it is true his numbers are down 20 points but that is deeply misleading because they have dropped from an unusually high 95% approval among Dems.
These focus groups are blatantly biased. If they had been chosen by objective standards intended to give viewers real insight into how Americans are thinking then 3/4 of the Democrats would have had positive things to say about Biden.
Our media has allowed itself to become an arm of the right wing propaganda machine. The fact that they would use the odious right wing spinner Frank Luntz is proof. He used to do this regularly for NBC with little criticism. Those same networks would never choose someone like James Carville to do the questioning.
That the New York Times hired Frank Luntz to do anything other than mop floors is a testament to how low the Old Gray Lady has stooped to perpetuate her own lazy and false narratives about Biden.
Luntz was, after all, the guy who organized the non-governing obstruction policy of the GOP on the evening of January 20, 2009 at The Caucus Room steakhouse where they all agreed that the best way to deal with Obama/Biden was to oppose and try to tank everything they proposed, even if they agreed with it, or caused the very messes Obama/Biden inherited, their oaths office be damned.
Robert Draper nailed it well in his book "Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside The House of Representatives": https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2012/6/8/1098434/-Eric-Cantor-Paul-Ryan-Kevin-McCarthy-Plot-To-Sabotage-US-Economy-with-Frank-Luntz
"Looking for additional ways to pile on President Joe Biden...". Sorry to say, made me laugh.
Anyway.
As Eric made clear but could have made a bit clearer, focus groups are insanely manipulatable. As a rule there is no justification for reporting on one, even less than that for a hard news operation to run one. Too, not like there aren't better, more important things to report were our awesome, exceptional mainstream interested in doing: Accurate reporting on the Biden economy, maybe fact-based reporting on Ukraine instead of just reporting what the Blob wants reported (too little of which is true). But we get focused groups.
I wonder if 'ordinary' people will emulate Mr. Young and seek alternative entertainment sources.
Essentially what they're doing is running a poll, but everyone knows that a poll with 10 people in it is worthless, so they call it something else. The polls aren't telling them what they want to hear, so they just make smaller and smaller ones.
Thank you for shining a light on the obvious reality that these focus groups are just more right wing garbage. We live in a world where media consolidation and takeover by the insanely rich who benefit from GOP policy are reporting “the news” snipped, manipulated and focused to represent their big money interests. I’m ever grateful for independent journalists who really live the WaPo tagline “Democracy Dies in the Dark”
On a lighter note, this reminded me of an SNL skit that I was thinking was a focus group but it was a taste test. If you need a laugh, go to YouTube and search SNL Taste Test. Brings me tears every time.
Gotta hype the game, sells more tickets.
Thank you for keeping tabs on the Press. I blog on Medium. My latest was titled "Will Journalism Save Our Democracy?" Sadly, I concluded, no. I gave you a mention in the piece. I monitor CNN's web site and have probably sent them 25 emails the past several months. Early this week they blared in the upper left lead that the crashing stock market was a big problem for Biden. By the end of the day, the market had fully recovered. Follow up story? What follow up story? Today we learned the our annual economy grew by 5.7%. Yet, no big lead on the CNN site, just a small story on the site's far right, and it was tied to the market being up because of a strong economic report. One of my blog's readers responded by turned my question on its ear. "Will Democracy Survive Journalism?"