2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumSalon.com -Bernie Sanders truthers, step down: There’s no conspiracy to hide that he “won” the debat
Most of the pundit class declared Clinton the debate winner, and now some Sanders supporters are getting paranoidTuesday nights Democratic debate had hardly been over 24 hours before an alarming conspiracy theory began to form: That the media is in cahoots with the Clinton campaign to cover up the fact that Bernie Sanders won the debate....
... Things really kicked off with this short piece by Adam Johnson of Alternet that argues that, by all objective measures, Sanders won the debate. Johnson pulls back from outright accusing the pundits of conspiracy, but already Sanders supporters are taking it to the next level, starting a Change.org petition accusing CNN, Time Warner, and SuperPACs of somehow conspiring to silence the truth.
Johnsons article, while being wielded like a weapon in said social media debates, is unfortunately poorly argued. For one thing, his entire argument is built on a straw man, which is that pundits arent being objective in their assessments. The problem is that no one ever said they were. Pundits, by their nature, are there to share their opinion.
Johnson, unlike the pundits he decries, actually does hold himself out as an objective observer. To bolster his claim that Sanders objectively won the debatenot that he trucks with such nonsense as winning debates!he cites the focus groups and online polls that showed Sanders as a winner. He admits that they are obviously not scientific, but then still rests his entire argument on them as the only relatively objective metric we have.
Well, they may be objective, but that doesnt mean they arent crap. Online polls are the worst possible measure of public opinion, except when it comes to focus groups. As Nate Silver explained in 2012, central challenge that Internet polls face is in collecting a random sample, which is the sine qua non of a scientific survey. The polls that Johnson cites, however, dont even try. Theyre polls that are open to anyone who wants to vote. Polls like that usually get flooded by highly motivated people who are on a missionsuch as Sanders supportersand therefore have no relationship whatsoever to what the average person is thinking.
This type of piece just adds fuel to the conspiratorial style of American politics, Joshua Holland, a contributor to the Nation, said in a critical post on Facebook:
The answer is that no journalist worth his or her salt takes those focus groups or online polls seriously.
The former have a handful of people watching the back-and-forth with these little doozers that they can dial up or down, so they're artificially compelled to hang onto every word in a way that no normal person watching a debate ever does. The latter are meaningless -- they're just novelty items.
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/15/bernie_sanders_truthers_step_down_theres_no_conspiracy_to_hide_that_he_won_the_debate/
Matariki
(18,775 posts)You can tell by the use of charged words like "truther" and misuse of the term "strawman". Or this gem "The very idea of winning a debate is silly to me, Johnson sniffs" - 'sniffs'? - seriously Salon. That's cheap.
As if there's been no demonstrable media blackout regarding Sanders.
mythology
(9,527 posts)It deserved to be treated with scorn. People who choose to believe that only they see the truth, should be dismissed as truthers.
Matariki
(18,775 posts)Especially before the debates - even with his record crowds. So it's not a stretch for people point out the media bias.
Certainly, both Clinton and Sanders did very well in the debate. We Democrats should be proud of the field of choices we have.
The obsession at this point of declaring a "winner", particularly at the expense of focusing on the issues discussed in the debate, just shows what a stupid spectator sport our political process has become. And sadly we're just as guilty here at DU.
AgingAmerican
(12,958 posts)Corporations would never do such a thing! How dare we even entertain such a thought crime!!