The Real Reason Ron Paul Supporters Hate the Old Media So Much

The polls upon which editors rely are unscientific hence unethical in the sense of the press having an ethical responsibility to serve the public:

The Old Media is relying on name recognition in polls like Gallup and Harris, etc. to determine their priority in who they cover—but name recognition is driven in large measure by Old Media coverage.

The ethical thing for Old Media editors to do is demand polls from Gallup, Harris, etc. that, instead of, in effect, asking for name recognition, ask for position matching. Obvious questions should be asked, such as:

If a candidate had opposed the entry of the US into Iraq, would you tend to support or oppose him?

etc…

But since Old Media editors are not ethical, we get very angry reactions from very informed people of integrity—like military vets who set foot in Iraq.

These are not men you want very angry with you.

Now, this may well be one of those cases where “One should never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.” but there comes a point where the distinction is irrelevant.

Now to the question of bias:

There are scientifically validated ways of constructing optimal questionnaires.

To construct such scientific questionnaires you start with an unscientific, but large, set of questions—large enough that you can reasonably expect it to touch on all of the critical dimensions of opinion. You then pick tolerably-small subsets of those questions to present to actual subjects. As you do so you start to construct a sparse matrix of questions vs answers—with many missing values—and run imputation algorithms such as Expectation Maximization or one of the many algorithms being developed to detect missing data in competitions like the Netflix Prize, which will tell you which questions provide you with the most predictive power over other questions. You then progressively bias the random selection of your questions toward those questions that you have evidence provide you with maximum information, continually retesting your model until you have a high degree of confidence you have a good subset. As a further refinement you can pursue conditional probability models involving Bayesian statistics so that you can dynamically customize the set of questions you ask of your subjects to extract the maximum predictive power from the set of questions you present to them.

None of this is particularly innovative and the methods are well established within statistics.

UPDATE: USA Today’s Candidate Match Game shows that this concept isn’t foreign to Old Media. Unfortunately, it does not appear to have affected their reporting priorities—probably in part due to the fact that it wasn’t conducted by Gallup or Harris in a scientific fashion. It reflects poorly on USA Today that they recognize such a “Matching Game” would be a reader draw and yet not recognize that the reason it might be appealing is that it is more valid than the polls from Gallup and Harris upon which their editorial/marketing decisions erroneously rely.

Posted by James Bowery on Tuesday, November 6, 2007 at 07:21 PM in
Comments (9) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by Fred Scrooby on November 06, 2007, 08:56 PM | #

Ron Paul sets one-day fundraising record.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on November 06, 2007, 09:26 PM | #

Here‘s a web-site presenting succinct recaps of a few of the ways in which Ron Paul is putting in a respectable campaign performance so far, for example, in web traffic, TV debates with the other candidates, grassroots networking, and fund raising.

Posted by Marge O'Brien on November 08, 2007, 09:10 AM | #

Wonderful video on one-hour interview with Nashua (NH) Telegraph editorial committee.

Wow, what an education!

http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071108/NEWS08/311080111

Posted by Frank McGuckin on November 08, 2007, 03:43 PM | #

James

Here are some facts to think about.

The percentage of people who use the MSM as a source for understanding the world is decliing. So there is a large population of Americans who are using alternative information sources to understand the world…or…there is a large population of Americans who have just completetly tuned out of reality. Take your pick.

The MSM media however is still a powerfull force in determinig who is a viable canidate. The MSM will frame issues for those Americans who will vote on nov 4 2008.

Since the 2000 election, presidential elections hace become a statistical coin toss. Re-run the election and the other guy wins. We are in the realm of statiitical dead heats.

This makes the pinhead swing vote -the kind of guy who at at moment will carry a sign for candiadte X until candidate Y walks by and pats him on the head, after which, at superluminal speed, he caries the sign for candidate Y-very important.

The MSM will influence the few thousand swing voters in some state that will determine if the next president is the testosterone-flushed bull-dyke or the satanic creature from Brooklyn.

I still can’t get over the fact Ron Paul,if elected, will continue to allow Legal asian immigrants and their offspring to actively participate in the deskilling of the majority Eur0-American population. Vdare.com writer Steve Sailer doesn’t seem to be the least bit bothered by the deskilling of the majority Euro-American population at the hands of post 1965 Asian legal immgrants. Take a look at of Sailers latest attempt to promote legal Asian legal immgration on his blog(WaA). What a cockroach Sailer is.There will be no White American and Asian political coalition. Within the borders of America, Asians are the mortal enemy of the majority white American population.It’s not White and Asians Stevie boy. It’s: Whites get rid of the predatory asians. Bring back THE CHINESE EXCLUSION. It was a wonderfull policy.

I do not support Ron Paul. Radical measures will have to be taken to soon or Euro-Americans will be reduced to racial minority in the nation they founded and created.

It would be much better if a large population of White Americans sat home on Nov 4 2008. This will discredit the political system.

I’m glad there is a severe drought in California. I’m looking forward to an economic collapse.
More and more White American men will become the asians bitch at work. WORSE IS BETTER. WORSE IS BETTER is a better choice than the pro-asian Ron Paul. Ron Paul is a cockroach

Vote for WORSE IS BETTER

Posted by Fred Scrooby on November 08, 2007, 08:33 PM | #

Randall Burns, writing today over at the Vdare.com blog, is pessimistic about Ron Paul’s chances for the Republican Party nomination: “I truly doubt that Paul can get the GOP nomination.” But that’s all right: if Paul loses the nomination he should simply take his campaign third-party. He does that, and suddenly all kinds of possibilities open up, ranging from winning the election on down (hey Perot nearly pulled it off!). In the meantime, did everyone see yesterday’s jaw-dropper? Is everyone sitting down? Pat Robertson endorsed Giuliani! That’s right, Giuliani, the pro-abortion pro-homosexual-“marriage” pro-sanctuary-city-for-illegals guy! That Giuliani! The same! None other! Endorsed by the Rev. Pat Robertson! All I can think is that Robertson is in some sort of quid pro quo deal with the Jewish neocons who created Giuliani’s campaign (Robertson has some kind of deal with Israel to broadcast in the Levant, has giant broadcast towers over there, and maybe some of Giuliani’s Jewish neocon puppeteers have “pull” in Israel such that Robertson wanted to make sure he “endorsed the right candidate ...” just in case his broadcast licenses over there came up for review or something ...).

Posted by James Bowery on November 08, 2007, 09:32 PM | #

Frank, I did address the issue of Ron Paul’s de facto support of middle class decimation through expansion of H-1b visas in my letter to VDARE , “Displaced Programmer Support for Ron Paul”, which they published in a highly edited form:

It’s good that Brimelow got Paul to answer some tough questions; particularly regarding H-1b visas, but the bigger problem is illustrated by what I experienced during my trip to Seattle, in its suburbs where I spent 2 days. I spent the weekend touring the coast of Puget Sound south of Seattle, through Tacoma. At one point I was having trouble believing what I was seeing, so I started counting cars as they went by. Out of the 20 cars, NOT ONE had a white male in it and white females were no more frequent than one would expect in east LA: Not exactly the original intent of what the preamble of the United States Constitution referred to as “our posterity”.

So you see, I’ve got bigger concerns than the loss of my livelihood to some hundreds of thousands of H-1b visa holders wielding questionable diplomas from Indian paper mills in jobs frequently handed to them out of ethnic nepotism. That is small potatoes compared to what has happened to places like the suburbs of Seattle. As much as I appreciate Brimelow’s accurate emphasis on the impact of H-1b visas on people like me, his failure to talk about Randall Burns’ idea of auctioning off citizenship and/or visas to discover the value of residence was the most glaring omission of the interview—particularly to the more faithful and thoughtful readers of VDARE.

At this point, the main difference in outcome between a Ron Paul victory and a Hillary Clinton victory is the degree of violence visited on people during the transition to a less insane government. A Ron Paul Presidency will further invoke Machiavelli’s rule: “A REPUBLIC OR A PRINCE OUGHT NOT TO DEFER BENEFITING MEN IN THEIR NECESSITY” basically stating that if you gut your population of its ability to reproduce, as has been done during the last generation and then call upon them during a challenge to your power—offering them benefits for coming to your assistance—they will rightfully attribute their bettered situation to your challenger. The people will rally behind a Ron Paul presidency and could quite easily result in complete resolution of the current tyranny with merely some assassinations and some government buildings blown up. If Hillary Clinton wins, the situation will become bad enough that the “heroes” to the West may turn out to be Islamic terrorists. I know which route I’d rather see the West take to its resolution.

Posted by Frank McGuckin on November 09, 2007, 08:25 AM | #

James

I understand your point. It crossed my mind when I was typing out my post.

Posted by Frank McGuckin on November 09, 2007, 08:32 AM | #

Nut suprised Scrooby. Robertson raped a Korean woman while serving in Korea according to former congressman MclCoskey who was serving with Robertson in Korea. Robertson’s father used his political influnece to kill a military investigation into Pat Robertson’s extracurricular activity.

I’ have really grown to hate Southern Evangelicals.

Posted by Cleaner44 on November 15, 2007, 09:48 PM | #

The Ron Paul campign continues grow daily. He has clearly surpassed John McCain and is now a “top tier” candidate. I have created a website to support this statement.
Please visit www.thecaseforronpaul.com and judge for yourself.

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