Salon.com -Bernie Sanders truthers, step down: There’s no conspiracy to hide that he “won” the debat

[wyldwolf]

Most of the pundit class declared Clinton the debate winner, and now some Sanders supporters are getting paranoid

Tuesday night’s 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.

Johnson’s 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 aren’t 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 debate—not 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 doesn’t mean they aren’t 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, don’t even try. They’re polls that are open to anyone who wants to vote. Polls like that usually get flooded by highly motivated people who are on a mission—such as Sanders supporters—and 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]

1. This is such a bullshit manipulative fluff piece

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]

3. The article it eviscerated was utterly worthless

It deserved to be treated with scorn. People who choose to believe that only they see the truth, should be dismissed as truthers.

[Matariki]

4. You'd have to have your head in a hole to not see the disparity of news coverage for Sanders

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]

2. Right, we trust corporate Time-Warner and the corporate Pundits

Corporations would never do such a thing! How dare we even entertain such a thought crime!!

[wyldwolf]

5. Kick

[wyldwolf]

6. kick