#congratulations on having the Socially Correct Opinion on a dying website

[minorfamilysupremacy]

going through the drafts is such a minefield because i have a pre-scandal stockpile from the long hiatus and it really wasn’t so long ago that we all were able to buy into biu’s vibrant bright future. i’m grateful to the people who are sticking with him and have been pro-biu since day one because without y’all, this shit would have been even more difficult than the soul-sucking shitshow it is now.

[amazingviralinfo]

To the surprise of precisely no one, Sen. Bernie Sanders has been announced as the winner of TIME magazines TIME 100 reader poll.

The online poll has become an annual target for activists, trolling pranksters, and fans of Korean R&B. While the digitally active base of Sanders propelled the septuagenarian politician to the top of the poll this year, previous winners include Indian anti-corruptionist Arvind Kejriwal, 4chan founder Christopher moot Poole, and K-pop sensation Rain. On at least two occasionsonce in 2009 and again in 2012hackers have manipulated the results so the first name of each candidate spells out an obscene message or inside joke.

The struggles of the TIME 100 poll are emblematic of these sorts of online polls. Typically meant as a form of reader engagement more than any scientific measurement, news outlets are often shockedshocked, I tell youto find out their survey is easily brigaded or, in the case of the TIME 100, straight up manipulated. Overall, they have become a silly, embarrassing practice in self-congratulation and data collection for both the media entities who offer them and the users who enjoy them.

The struggles of the TIME 100 poll are emblematic of these sorts of online polls.

More than simply a nuisance, however, they represent a deeper problem in measuring peoples opinions and behavior in a way that is both representative and useful.

The easiest example of this might be the post-debate polls offered by websites and news outlets to allow people to vote for which presidential candidate they feel won the debate. The Drudge Report, for example, has held such a survey of its largely conservative readers after each of the 12 GOP debates. Thus far, Donald Trump has walked away cleanly with 10 out of 11 victories (Trump did not attend the Jan. 28 debate held by Fox News) in the Drudge poll. His victory is touted proudly by Drudges fellow pro-Trump outlets like Breitbart, Infowars, and even Trump himself as true a measure of public opinion as an actual poll.

One might consider The Drudge Report as a representative sample of conservativesthe site, managed solely by journalist Matt Drudge, has quietly remained one of the most influential news publications and one that regularly sways the national conversation. Despite its stoic design philosophy and abject bias, The Drudge Report collects nearly 18 million unique monthly visitors. If any media outletespecially a digitally based onestands a chance of accurately tracking online opinions of Republicans, its likely Drudge.

Except, as in the Time 100 poll, Drudges polls are too easily bombarded by people whose ideological interest is unlike that of his GOP rivals, a portion of Trumps base is as youthful and tech-savvy as the same troops that show up to support Sanders. A poll done by Harvard Universitys Kennedy Schoolan actual polling outlet with representative samples and weights against biasfinds Trump winning among millennials against his rivals by similar margins Sanders has topped Clinton.

Hence why Sanders and Trump have handily won most debate polls held by any outlet. And more than the people voting in them take their result seriously. According to Matt Drudge himself, one supporter of Sen. Ted Cruz (or at least one opponent to Donald Trump) might have created a voting bot to manipulate the results of the poll in favor of Cruz. Trump has seriously offered his performance in these polls as true measures of his support in response to perceived slights or bias.

Even though every poll, Time, Drudge etc., has me winning the debate by a lot, @FoxNews only puts negative people on. Biased - a total joke!

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2016

All polls have me winning debate big- Drudge, TIME, etc. Dopey Charles Krauthammer still nasty. He has zero cred- totally dishonest!

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 14, 2016

Loved doing the debate...won Drudge and all on-line polls! Amazing evening, moderators did an outstanding job.

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 11, 2015

Every poll, Time, Drudge, Slate and others, said I won both debates - but heard Megyn Kelly had her two puppets say bad stuff. I don't watch

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2015

As an actual measure of data, these polls are absolutely 100 percent meaningless. They dont accurately measure opinions of voters. They dont even accurately measure opinions of the visitors to the sites hosting them. All they can tell anyone is how people voted in them. Polls, to be considered even close to accurate, must include a litany of measures to prevent the kind of bias seen in the Drudge poll or the flooding and hacking seen in the TIME poll. The National Council on Public Polls offers no less than 20 considerations for journalists and consumers when reading polls, from who funded the poll and the sample population size down to the sampling errors and order of the questions asked. Online polls fulfill almost zero of these obligations.

Their ineffectiveness and vulnerability is one reason they are a poor option for actual pollsters in an age when the public opinion poll could very well be dying. According to historian Jill Lepores damning New Yorker piece about the state of modern polling, pollsters are struggling to get an increasingly-mobile world to respond to polls (mostly performed on landline phones). The promise of this work is that the sample is exquisitely representative, writes Lepore. But the lower the response rate the harder and more expensive it becomes to realize that promise, which requires both calling many more people and trying to correct for non-response bias by giving greater weight to the answers of people from demographic groups that are less likely to respond.

Nate Silver, perhaps the worlds first and only celebrity pollster, agrees. It's quite challenging to conduct a poll now when most people are not picking up a random stranger's telephone call answering a survey, he said. Online polls might solve the sample size problemhundreds of thousands of people vote in each Drudge pollbut they lack the randomness to serve as an accurate representation of any meaningful population. Online polls don't use probability, which means there's no wayunless you're the NSAof randomly picking someone online," Silver says.

So why do them? Why would media outlets continue a practice that is functionally meaningless? The first and most obvious is trafficgiving supporters of candidates a chance to actually support their candidate in a way that makes them feel useful and heard can be a huge draw, much more than simply an article about that candidate could do. Another purpose, however, is the sheer amount of specified data such surveys allow outlets and other companies to collect. After all, marketers and data analysts use surveys all the time to gather measures of how certain populations might respond to a particular product or ad campaign.

Perhaps more than any other media outlet, Buzzfeed has this down to a science. Each of those quizzes promising to reveal which Harry Potter character you are or what kind of grandparent youll be is harnessed by Buzzfeeds impressive data analytics arm to give a micromanaged view of its audience to marketers. They dont just make data collection easythey make it fun.

Theres little reason to suspect polls like that of the TIME 100 arent used for similar purposes. So not only do such surveys attract hordes of activated users, they encourage those users to hand over information about their positions or stances a news site might otherwise struggle to glean.

Online polls are useless when projecting onto any other kind of audience, no matter the overlap. But as measures of activation and devotion for a candidate, position, or even a pop star, they might just tell marketers all they need to hear.

Gillian Branstetter is a social commentator with a focus on the intersection of technology, security, and politics. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Business Insider, Salon, the Week, and xoJane. She attended Pennsylvania State University. Follow her on Twitter @GillBranstetter.

L.A. Foodie / Flickr (CC by 2.0) | Remix by Max Fleishman

[newstfionline]

The media’s war on Trump

Thomas Frank, The Guardian, 21 July 2017

These are the worst of times for the American news media, but they are also the best. The newspaper industry as a whole has been dying slowly for years. But for the handful of well funded journalistic enterprises that survive, the Trump era is turning out to be a “golden age”--a time of high purpose and moral vindication.

The people of the respectable east coast press loathe the president with an amazing unanimity. They are obsessed with documenting his bad taste, with finding faults in his stupid tweets, with nailing him and his associates for this Russian scandal and that one. They outwit the simple-minded billionaire. They find the devastating scoops. The op-ed pages come to resemble Democratic fundraising pitches. The news sections are all Trump all the time. They have gone ballistic so many times the public now yawns when it sees their rockets lifting off.

A recent Alternet article I read was composed of nothing but mean quotes about Trump, some of them literary and high-flown, some of them low-down and cruel, most of them drawn from the mainstream media and all of them hilarious. As I write this, four of the five most-read stories on the Washington Post website are about Trump; indeed (if memory serves), he has dominated this particular metric for at least a year.

And why not? Trump certainly has it coming. He is obviously incompetent, innocent of the most basic knowledge about how government functions. His views are repugnant. His advisers are fools. He appears to be dallying with obviously dangerous forces. And thanks to the wipeout of the Democratic party, there is no really powerful institutional check on the president’s power, which means that the press must step up.

But there’s something wrong with it all.

The news media’s alarms about Trump have been shrieking at high C for more than a year. It was in January of 2016 that the Huffington Post began appending a denunciation of Trump as a “serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, birther and bully” to every single story about the man. It was last August that the New York Times published an essay approving of the profession’s collective understanding of Trump as a political mutation--an unacceptable deviation from the two-party norm--that journalists must cleanse from the political mainstream.

It hasn’t worked. They correct and denounce; they cluck and deride and Trump seems to bask in it. He reflects this incredible outpouring of disapprobation right back at the press itself. The old “liberal bias” critique, a minor deity in the pantheon of Republican paranoia since the days of Trump’s hero Richard Nixon, has been elevated to first place. Trump and company now use it to explain everything. And the news media’s reputation sinks lower and lower as they advance into their golden age.

What explains this dazzling disconnect? Yes, Trump is unpopular these days, but not nearly as unpopular as he deserves to be (among other amazing things, he is now reported to be more popular than Hillary Clinton). How can our opinion-leaders believe something so unanimously, so emphatically, and yet have so little success persuading their erstwhile opinion-followers to get in line?

One part of the explanation is the structural situation of the news media. As newspapers die off, their place in the American consciousness is taken by social networks of both the formal and informal variety. Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, these days we read only that which confirms our biases. Once upon a time, perhaps, the Washington Post could single-handedly bring down a president, but those days have passed.

But there’s also a second reason, one that is even more fundamental. The truth is that the unanimous anti-Trumpness of the respectable press is just one facet of a larger homogeneity. As it happens, the surviving press in this country is unanimous about all sorts of things.

There are their views on trade. Or their views on what they call “populism”. Or their views on what they call “bipartisanship”. Or their views on just about anything having to do with the decline of manufacturing (sad but inevitable) and the rise of the “creative” white-collar professions (the smart ones, so meritorious).

This is one of the factors that explains the many monstrous journalism failures of the last few decades: the dot-com bubble, which was actively cheered on by the business press; the Iraq war, which was abetted by journalism’s greatest sages; the almost complete failure to notice the epidemic of professional misconduct that made possible the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of Donald Trump, which (despite the media’s morbid fascination with the man) caught nearly everyone flatfooted.

Everything they do, they do as a herd--even when it’s running headlong over a cliff.

They still cannot suppress their admiration for bankers. Just the other week, for example, the New York Times’s Dealbook section could be found marveling at how one of the senior officers of Goldman Sachs (“possibly the most powerful investment bank in the world”) likes to DJ in his spare time.

They are endless suckers for credentialing, especially of the foreign policy variety. Last Friday, the Washington Post ran a profile of Hillary Clinton’s former foreign policy adviser, whom they caught up with giving a talk at Yale, his alma mater.

The paper told how the adviser “ran through a list of his early mentors”, including eminent personages from Brookings, the State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations, and then turned to the inevitable matter of Clinton’s loss, a subject so bittersweet you could almost see the tears streaming down readers’ faces as they were prompted to recall, yet again, the ingratitude of a nation that had rejected her team of brilliants for the buffoon Trump.

Similar examples could be piled up by the dozens, if not the thousands. The American news media’s respect for tech CEOs and foreign-policy experts are the photographic negative of their overwhelming contempt for Dumb Donald.

These things don’t happen because the journalists that remain are liberals. It happens because so many of them are part of the same class--an exalted and privileged class. They are professionals and they believe in the things that so many other professional groups believe in: consensus, “realism”, credentialing, the wisdom of their fellow professionals and (of course) the stupidity of the laity.

This is the key to understanding many of their biases--and also for understanding why they are so utterly oblivious to how they appear to the rest of America.

What do I mean? Consider Politico’s famous email tip-sheet, Playbook, which is read religiously every morning by countless members of the DC press corps, including myself. About two-thirds of the publication consists of useful summaries of the day’s news stories.

The rest, however, is a sort of People magazine for the Washington journalist community, in which the reader is invited to celebrate leading journalists’ (and politicians’) birthdays, congratulate leading journalists (and politicians) for their witty phrase-making, learn which leading journalist (and politician) was seen at which party and anticipate which leading journalist (and politician) is going to be on which Sunday program.

Nor is Playbook the only entry in this genre. Before there was Politico there was ABC News and The Note, a similar email newsletter that also celebrated what it called the Gang of 500, the happy and hard-partying political and journalistic insiders who supposedly made Washington tick.

These things seem innocent and fun, of course. But there is an unwritten purpose to these daily honor rolls of journo/political friendship and that is to define the limits of what is acceptable.

Like the guestlist at Lally Weymouth’s party in the Hamptons, which was described so salaciously in Playbook a little while ago, a tiny handful of people and publications and ideas are in; everyone else is out.

It’s about legitimacy, of course, and what’s left of the respectable press is utterly captivated by the theme. It completely defines their war on Trump, for example. They know what a politician is supposed to look like and act like and sound like; they know that Trump does not conform to those rules; and they react to him as a kind of foreign object jammed rudely into their creamy world, a Rodney Dangerfield defiling the fancy country club.

I believe that the news media needs to win its war with Trump, and urgently so. But as long as they understand that war as a crusade to reestablish the old rules of legitimacy, they are going to continue to fail. Until the day they get it right, the world will burn while the in-crowd parties obliviously on.