That poll created by wingnut John Ziegler purporting to demonstrate that Obama voters were misinformed by the mainstream media about Barack Obama and Joe Biden (and defended so scatalogically by Ziegler) has been examined by objective polling experts beyond Nate Silver now, and the verdict is unanimous:

Wall Street Journal:

“..Interpreted the numbers from the survey in a misleading fashion.”

Pollster.com:

The Zogby summary quotes Ziegler claiming that “the poll really proves beyond any doubt the stunning level of malpractice on the part of the media in not educating the Obama portion of the voting populace.”

The problem, as Silver points out, is that the survey does no such thing. It proves only that Obama voters surveyed were less likely to attribute to Obama or Biden a half dozen statements that were “at best debatable, yet apparently represented as factual to the respondent” …

… Describing his biased, leading questions as a legitimate test of knowledge is hugely misleading, at best.

Even John Zogby himself is running from this survey, claiming it was put together while he was on vacation. While paying lip service to its ostensible validity, he adds:

“I also believe it was not our finest hour. This slipped through the cracks. It came out critical only of Obama voters.”

In fairness, this is exactly what I have heard conservatives say about liberals on many issues, particularly moral ones like same-sex marriage. And at least for me, it’s somewhat true; I can *believe* that some people consider having two different kinds of genitalia in each marriage to be the raison d’etre of the institution, I just am surprised that such people can function in our modern society. I am not sure how to go about persuading people who think “It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” is a clever rationale for their position.

As for why conservatives think the Bill Ayers issue is important, let’s condense:

Bill Ayers was himself involved in acts of property destruction, and led a group that attempted to kill people (cf. the nail bomb to be used at a military dance; the bombing of a judge’s home; etc.). He dedicated a book in part to RFK’s assassin. He has stated his regret that people got hurt physically in anything in which he was involved (see, e.g. his and Dohrn’s apology to Richard Elrod, who was injured in the Days of Rage rioting). Most voters would say his acts were morally condemnable and that he himself, by failing to admit that those acts were wrong, is a morally bad person in this respect. (I think people can be morally bad in one way yet good in another; for example, Cindy McCain’s rhetoric about Obama was morally bad politicking, but she seems to be morally praiseworthy in her concern for less fortunate people in developing countries.)

Conservatives therefore say that Obama showed bad judgment in associating with Ayers for various purposes: for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, the Woods Fund, reading and praising Ayers’s book on juvenile justice, using Ayers’s house as a site to meet politically active people in the neighborhood. There is a range of opinion on this: Charles Krauthammer thinks anyone who ever shook Ayers’s hand is an indecent person; people with a stronger grip on their sanity are content to say that such poor judgment may be acceptable in a college president but not in our nation’s president.

The sane conservatives therefore HAVE said why they think the Ayers association is important. They have to some extent tried to persuade. What they keep hitting their heads against is that people who voted for Obama just didn’t think it was as important as the conservatives did. In the 2008 election’s choice between supposedly poor judgment on people at whose home to have coffee, and proven poor judgment about the war in Iraq (with regard to both Clinton and McCain) and economic policy (McCain), the voters decided to risk that Obama might have coffee at some jerk’s house, rather than to risk that Clinton or McCain would start a war of aggression in Iran.

Limbaugh used the poll exactly as Ziegler intends it to be used: to attack Obama supporters for not knowing the truth about their candidate and the media for keeping that truth from voters. It’s got nothing really to do with the media portrayal of John McCain. It’s all about what Obama supporters did or did not know about Obama.

Ultimately, Ziegler believes that had voters been giving the truth about Obama, they would not have voted for him, and so there really is no mandate for Obama’s plans and policies. They are not really what people voted for because they did not have the whole story.

This is the crux of the argument because Ziegler’s larger purpose here is to undermine the legitimacy of Obama’s support and hence his agenda — that and sell a bunch of cheap ass DVDs.

Last night I finally made it all the way through the 10 minute video clip at Ziegler’s site. It ends with an Obama supporter confessing that she may not be as informed as she thought she was but that on learning Biden was accused of plagiarism or that Obama had all his opponents kicked off the ballot in his first election, she would not have changed her vote.

To Ziegler, this is a horrifying admission. It is not rational to him that one could both know about Bill Ayers and vote for Obama. To do so reveals everything about the irrationality at the core of Obama’s support.

Ziegler’s attitude here is exactly what Nate Silver describes in his follow up to his Ziegler interview:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/did-talk-radio-kill-conservatism.html

There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.

In Ziegler’s mind, all one has to know about Obama is that he once attended a fundraising event in the house of Bill Ayers. He cannot comprehend a world in which most people don’t give a shit. Indeed, he cannot even comprehend a world in which one should even have to make the case for why it matters! Can’t these people see?!?!?! IT JUST DOES!!!!

At any rate, Ziegler is a buffoon. I can’t believe i’ve just wasted so much time on this.

Quaker, I’m not a saint, just a really bad procrastinator.

I love these iterations of My One Black Friend Says.

From the article Special Ed cites:

“They’re new voters and immigrants. They’ve been brought in by groups like ACORN, from the inner cities. They’re more likely to make mistakes. I’ve bounced this off of minority people, and they agree with me.””

Then this turd of wisdom kicks up from Ed’s Hot Air litter box:

“Is he admitting that Franken and ACORN enticed non-citizens to vote?”

Some people just need to be put down.

Looks like even Democrats want to partake in this initiative and smear campaign to portray their voters as ill-informed idiots .

Franken should be expecting a very angry blog post on this from Nate Silver. After he does his research first this time.

PG, we disagree then on what Ziegler says he wants to prove. If he isn’t arguing that media bias had a measurable and specific effect on voting in the 2009 presidential election, what the hell is he arguing?

So what? Even if they were, simply having heard or not heard the information is only the first part of proving his thesis, such as it is.

Zeigler should have followed up his first questions with, “If you had heard that Biden/Obama were plagiarists/pals with terrorists/socialists /etc. would it have changed your vote?”

I don’t follow this. If what he wants to prove is that the media overplayed negative info on McCain/Palin, and underplayed negative info on Obama/Biden, then it’s irrelevant whether knowing the information about Obama would have changed the vote for the specific voter. For some people, media bias is bad even if it doesn’t have an easily-measured effect on voting.

As long as Ziegler’s cheque doesn’t bounce, and this poll gets him on Fox News, I bet he is laughing.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

I’ll bet Mr. Zogby is laughing too.

Exactly. This guy is going to make a cheap as film, self-distribute it as a dvd via the web and hope he makes some fast, easy cash from people who want to reinforce their own world view during a moment of uncertainty.

This is not a phenomenon that is unique to the right, but this instance of it seems particularly obvious and crass.

He needed Zogby’s good name to give his bullshit poll weight.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Style over substance fallacy. You are ignoring the substance of the argument and instead attacking one term that was used.

Well, yeah, but we knew that already. He needs Zogby to tell him that? I could’a done that for half whatever he paid in cash.

So what? Even if they were, simply having heard or not heard the information is only the first part of proving his thesis, such as it is.

Zeigler should have followed up his first questions with, “If you had heard that Biden/Obama were plagiarists/pals with terrorists/socialists /etc. would it have changed your vote?”

He didn’t follow up with this question probably because he didn’t want to have someone on camera saying “No. What fucking difference does any of that crap that make?”

Certainly, some percentage of people might change their vote on hearing that Obama may have had a few canapes in the Ayer’s living room. But simply determining whether people knew this “fact” or not is not the way to prove how many people would have, let alone, that this would have been a decisive number of people.

It’s easy to come up with a definition and metric for measuring the amount of negative coverage that one candidate or another received.

How the specific stories that made up that coverage, however, swayed someone’s vote or not is far more difficult to judge with any accuracy.

Again, I heard every single negative story about Obama/Biden that Zeigler’s complaining weren’t covered enough, including a few that he isn’t complaining about, and it didn’t sway my vote in the least. I heard a lot of negative shit about McCain too which really only reinforced my decision. But was there some piece of positive news about McCain that, if I had heard it, would have changed my mind? I can honestly say, fuck no.

How exactly do you measure that attitude in a poll that only wants to find out what I knew, instead of how I weighed and judged what I knew?