Reply #20: Bush is only part of a larger phenomenon [View All]

[depakid]

or phenomena, that I've come to collective denote as a "culture of lies."

Looking at the corporate media over the past 2 decades, one can see a steady erosion of respect for the notion of credibility and reason. Gore discusses this a little bit in his book, and Krugman's also commented about it from time to time.

Basically, ethics and responsibility have taken a leave of absence- to the point where people in America will say most anything (no matter whether it's patently false and disprovable or not). Having lived through it on the ground in the states and viewing it from abroad today (Australia) the contrasts couldn't be more glaring.

In some instances it's intentional- any grad student woth their salt in the sciences or social sciences should be able to tweak the methodology to produce a "scientific" result in keeping with the clients' wishes- or the "conventional wisdom. Then again, it's easy enough to do this unintentionally as well.

There are multiple problems with the usual polling techniques that render them less than valid (or even reliable) -much less predictive of outcomes that are often weeks (or months) away.

Doing proper research that actually reflects a populations attitudes, beliefs and values is difficult- tricky and expensive, which is the reason why campaigns spend a lot of money on internals- and keep the results of that research held very tightly to their chests....