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Years ago I wrote a speech in College, the title was : “you can’t believe everything you read in the papers”. The article below has proven me right after all of these years.

By Kathleen Searles, Martha Humphries Ginn and Jonathan Nickens

Washington Post

Many news consumers know by now to take any single election-year poll with a grain of salt. Because of sampling variation and the vagaries of survey research, the best approach is to focus not on individual polls but on polling averages.

Our research suggests yet another reason not to overreact to news stories about the newest poll: Media outlets tend to cover the surveys with the most “newsworthy” results, which can distort the picture of where the race stands.

Why? Consider the incentives of the news business. News outlets cover polls because they fit the very definition of newsworthiness. They’re new, timely, often generate conflict and allow political reporters to appear objective by simply telling readers and viewers what the public thinks. Horse-race stories are also popular.

Given that readers are drawn to drama and uncertainty, polls that offer intrigue or new developments — such as a close race or signs that one candidate is surging — are more likely to be deemed newsworthy. In particular, polls with unusual results may be more likely to make the news.

On the other hand, surveys that reveal stability or a lack of drama — such as one candidate maintaining a modest, steady lead — are less likely to get attention. Such judgments may lead news outlets to distort the true state of the race.

Though all this is well known, systematically observing this selection process is hard to do. The best way to study “gatekeeping” is to compare what gets on the news to all of the stories that could have made it on the news. And scholars have a hard time knowing all the possible stories that don’t make it past the gates, although some researchers have tried.

Here’s how we did our research

To get past that, we compared two data sets about polling during the 2008 presidential campaign. First, we collected the entire array of publicly available national presidential vote polls. Second, we analyzed poll coverage on the three broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) and on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC for the last five months of the campaign, from June 4 to Nov. 4. We did this by analyzing transcripts on these channels between 6 and 10 p.m., and recording every mention of a poll, as well as what margin it reported between Obama and John McCain.

That meant we could compare all the polls that the TV networks could have reported on to the polls that they actually did report on.

Television news reported on “dramatic” polls more than the average poll

Here’s what we found. Television news was indeed more likely to report on polls that showed a tight race between Obama and McCain than on polls in which one candidate had a larger lead.

In the graph below, we show our data. The red line shows us the shape of poll results, which tells us the probability of a given result for all released polls. For the purposes of comparison, the margins have been standardized.) The polls were roughly normally distributed. Many showed a 0 — essentially a tied race — and others showed either small leads for Obama (which you’ll see in the positive numbers) or McCain (which shows up in the negative numbers).

But TV news was more likely to report on polls, as you’ll see in the blue line, where the two candidates were close, those between +1 and -1. You can see that in the blue spike right around the 0 mark. In other words, television news viewers got a picture of the 2008 presidential race as much closer than the polls as a whole typically showed it to be. The longer tails of the blue line also suggest television news gave disproportionate air time to a few extreme, outlier polls.

TV news also spent more time reporting on the more dramatic polls

Not only that, but we also compare the polls that made it on the air to the attention those polls received. Sure enough, television news spent more time reporting on surveys in which the race seemed close than was warranted by the actual polling.

In the graph below, we see in the red line that for all the polls that were reported on, Obama tended to hold a lead. That’s why the curve is shifted to the right of zero. Real Clear Politics’ (RCP) polling average had Obama in the lead 144 out of 154 days during the time period examined, so that’s pretty accurate.

But check out the blue line, which shows which of these polls got the most air time. That curve is clustered closer to the zero-line. On average, viewers likely heard more about polls that portrayed the race as close than about polls that more accurately showed Obama in the lead.

Finally, TV news gave more air time to surveys that showed a big jump in one direction or the other. In other words, big changes in poll margins are more dramatic — and more likely to be discussed on air.

So for TV news consumers, the message remains the same: Keep your eye on those polling averages.

Kathleen Searles is an assistant professor of political communication in the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.

Martha Humphries Ginn is an associate professor of political science at Augusta University.

Jonathan Nickens is a Ph.D. student in political science at Louisiana State University.

© 1996-2016 The Washington Post

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We had something to do with this as well as Britain and others.  We being new to the situation have put up loud shouts based on insufficient information and continue to want to have all out war in the middle east. We would spend valuable capital in lives and money trying fix a problem that we cannot fix. Our end result would be an occupation situation with the guerilla warfare going on around us and with us. This post from Listverse will explain it.

Morris M.
Listverse
Right now, the phrase “Middle East” is pretty much synonymous with “gigantic clusterf—k.” But how did things get to be so monumentally bad? How did a region once famed for its tolerance, wisdom, and learning turn into one famed for bloodshed, mayhem, and chaos? To figure that out, we need to delve into the region’s history.
10 The Sunni/Shia Split
In AD 632, things must have been looking pretty rosy for Islam. The outcast sect had swept through Mecca, uniting the entire Arabian peninsula. Muhammad’s clan was strong, they had God on their side, and there were fresh lands for conquering.
Then Muhammad died without naming an heir, and everything went to hell.
Between all his conquering and religion-founding, Muhammad hadn’t found time to father a son. This meant that no one knew who took over when he died. Many of his followers thought his father-in-law, Abu Bakr, should be the first caliph. A smaller, separate bunch thought his cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib should be the first Imam. From that minor disagreement arose the sectarian split that’s been haunting the region ever since—the divide between Sunnis (team Abu) and Shia (team Ali).

9 Centuries Of Disagreement
Despite their differences, the two teams rubbed along fine at first. After three Sunni-chosen caliphs, Team Abu even agreed to make Shia Ali their fourth caliph. Everyone was happy.
Then Ali died, and his son took over. Deciding that one Shia caliph was enough, the Sunnis deposed him. That event set the course for the next 1,400 years of history.
The Shia created their own hierarchy, recognizing imams descended from Ali instead of caliphs. Sometimes, these two systems got along, but when they didn’t, the Shia suffered. During the 16th century, the Ottomans mass executed 40,000 Shia. Later, the Indian Mughal emperors would burn Shia scholars alive. Later still, British colonialists would hire Sunni militias to hunt Shia rebels in Iraq.
Naturally, this led to simmering resentments. As history shows, such resentments have a tendency to eventually boil over.
8 Saudi Arabia’s Deal With The Devil
While these problems were ticking over, an 18th-century Islamic reformist named Ibn Abd al-Wahhab was getting mad.
At the time, Sunni Islam had a big list of stuff you couldn’t do (like worshiping images) that the Shia nonetheless did. Wahhab thought the restrictions should be even stricter and that those who broke them were apostates. That meant the Quran sanctioned their killing.
Wahhabism caught on big time in the Sunni world, so much so that the House of Saud decided to make an alliance with its preachers. In return for their endorsement of the fledgling Saud state, the House of Saud would promote the Wahhabists and shower them with funds.
The pact worked; the House of Saud became rulers of the powerful Saudi Arabia. But it also left them in hock to a dangerous, ultraconservative ideology. It wouldn’t be long before their alliance came back to haunt them.
7 Lines On Maps
For centuries, the Sunni Ottoman Empire was the beast of the Middle East. A superpower that styled itself as a continuation of the Caliphate, it was the glue holding the Middle East together.
Then World War I hit.
If the Great War was bad for Europe, it was a calamity for the Ottomans. Their empire disappeared overnight. The Allied powers divided it up into new nations by drawing a series of lines on a map. From the dust of Turkish rule, Syria, Iraq, and other modern nations arose.
The trouble was that these nations were made up of peoples with not much in common. Shias and Sunnis were thrown together and told to play nice. Kurds, Christians, Yazidis, and others were spread thinly between states. Essentially, a whole bunch of mini-Yugoslavias had just been created. And like Yugoslavia, it only worked so long as there was prosperity and no stoking of ethnic tensions.
6 Iran Gets The CIA Treatment
As all this was going on, there still remained one final player waiting in the wings. In 1941, Iran’s pro-Hitler shah was deposed by Allied forces. This led to a brief flirtation with democracy that would have ramifications for those ethnic tensions we just mentioned.
Although the Allies were happy to see the Iranians trying out democracy, they didn’t like who they democratically elected. Mohammad Mosaddegh was a secular, pro-democracy anti-Islamist who just happened to be a Marxist. As such, he nationalized the British-connected Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The Brits went running to the Americans, who orchestrated a coup to remove Mosaddegh and replace him with the shah’s son.
The new shah was just as corrupt and dictatorial as his daddy. Realizing that democracy had just gotten them more oppression, Iran’s masses began to look for alternative methods of revolution. They found them in the county’s marginalized hard-line Shia preachers.
5 Saudi Arabia’s Internal Problems
Back in Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud was in a worrying bind.
By the 1970s, Wahhabism had gotten very extreme. Its anti-Shia, pro-jihad ideology was attracting hate preachers who poured bile across the Middle East, stoking up Sunni-Shia tensions. It was from these teachings that Al-Qaeda would eventually emerge.
Unfortunately, the internal politics of Saudi Arabia had become so tense that pulling the plug on Wahhabism was impossible. The clerics would’ve whipped up a revolution. So the royal family kept quietly funding this poison, exporting Wahhabism to an ever bigger audience.
Like Chinese water torture, this constant drip-drip of hate was slowly taking effect. The Saudis were spending literally billions of dollars pushing an ultra-extreme version of Islam on Sunnis in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Bahrain—and people were listening. Suddenly, Sunnis and Shia were beginning to look at one another with a whole lot of distrust.
4 Iran Gets Its Revolution
January 7, 1978, marked the moment that all these little streams began to converge into one big, roaring river. It was the start of the Iranian Revolution, a revolution which would see the shah flee, the Ayatollah Khomeini take his place, and the establishment of a hard-line Shia theocracy. It was also the moment that Sunni Saudi Arabia went into panic mode.
The revolution challenged the Saud state’s very being. The Ayatollah explicitly argued that hereditary kingship was against Islam. He also declared post revolutionary Iran to represent all Muslims, something Saudi Arabia already claimed about itself. Those old seventh-century problems about Sunni/Shia legitimacy were resurfacing again.
Over the following decades, both countries began to deliberately play on those issues to legitimize their own rule. Saudi Arabia fed the Wahhabists even more money to preach the evils of Shia Islam. Iran tried to foment a Shia uprising against Saudi Arabia’s ruling Sunni clique. Each interference brought the temperature ever closer to boiling point.
3 The Iraq Disaster
Throughout the Iranian-Saudi rivalry, there was one wild card keeping everyone in check: Both sides regarded Saddam Hussein as an existential threat. The Iraqi dictator’s wild temper and obvious insanity scared everyone and counterintuitively helped to stabilize the region. Like two fighters caged up with a rabid dog, neither side wanted to make the first move and risk being bitten.
Then 2003 rolled round, and the US shot the dog.
Saddam’s death removed the last check on Iran and Saudi Arabia’s power games. Worse, it encouraged the two regional superpowers to try to fill the power vacuum in Iraq. Saudi Arabia sided with Saddam’s deposed Sunni allies, arming them against the new Shia government. Iran, meanwhile, backed Iraq’s new Shia rulers as they went on a bloody rampage against the Sunnis who had ruled them for so long.
One group to benefit from this chaos were Sunni jihadists Al-Qaeda in Iraq. They would eventually become famous under another name—ISIS.
2 Power Games
With no Saddam and Iraq in flames, Iran and Saudi Arabia began to extend their power games across the region. In Lebanon, Bahrain, and Yemen, both backed their Shia or Sunni allies against the other. Propaganda was pumped into conflict-free countries through mosques and outlets like PressTV. Suddenly, the old divide between Sunni and Shia was at the forefront of Middle Eastern life once again.
As new sectarian conflicts erupted across the region, it became harder and harder for Sunnis and Shia elsewhere not to take sides. In the same way that the Irish Troubles stirred Protestant and Catholic rivalries in the UK, these conflicts magnified the ancient schism and made it seem a matter of life and death.
Then, the Arab Spring exploded. As dictators toppled, wars erupted, and old certainties fell, Iran and Saudi Arabia began to fight for control of the emerging new order. Their struggle would eventually come to a head in Syria.
1 Syria Goes To Hell
By 2011, the old sectarian rivalries had been brought to boiling point. Battle-hardened jihadists were preparing for an apocalyptic war. Two regional superpowers were willing to destroy everything in a deadly game of chicken.
It was like everything had been leading up to this. Saudi Arabia saw a chance to remove Assad, the Iran-friendly Shia dictator. Iran felt it couldn’t let Saudi Arabia establish a Sunni client state on its doorstep. When Assad gassed his own people and the West did nothing, many Sunnis saw it as confirmation that the US and Europe were siding with Shia Iran. Primed by decades of apocalyptic Wahhabist preaching, they went to fight, joining and empowering groups like ISIS.
The result is a region that is now more divided than it has been for centuries—a mess of factional alliances, dangerous power games, and two big beasts carelessly using an ancient schism to boost their agendas. Until the dust clears and a winner is eventually declared, it’s likely that the Middle East will remain completely screwed up.

Gloria Steinem on woman managing Trump campaign: ‘Like seeing an anti-Semitic candidate being managed by a Jewish person’

Michael Walsh
Reporter

August 17, 2016

Feminist trailblazer Gloria Steinem was not much impressed by Donald Trump’s appointing a woman to manage his presidential campaign.

“It’s like seeing an anti-Semitic candidate being managed by a Jewish person. It’s not heartening at all. I can’t imagine why she’s doing it,” Steinem told Yahoo News Wednesday, after the Trump campaign announced that Republican strategist and pollster Kellyanne Conway had been promoted to campaign manager.

Steinem, 82, addressed the latest Trump campaign shakeup during a wide-ranging interview with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric. They discussed Trump’s appeal, political correctness and her memoir, “My Life on the Road,” among other topics.

“He’s a bully and also he’s not a successful businessman. He inherited his money. He calls Hillary cowardly and I think to myself, ‘Have you ever given birth?” Steinem continued. (Steinem, who married for the first time when she was 66, has one stepson.) “It is unprecedented that we have had someone with so little experience, so little accuracy, so much bombast, such a bully.”

According to Steinem, Trump is the candidate of discontent, hatred and nostalgia for a past that never existed.

“He’s big. He’s simple. He’s a brand. He’s not a person. He’s a brand,” she said. “He makes impossible promises and he appeals to people who legitimately are having a hard economic time. … He’s the candidate of unnamed resentments, and everybody knows his name.”

Couric pointed out that bashing political correctness has almost become a mantra for Trump and that it’s been resonating with many Americans — even among people who aren’t supporting him. Many today feel that others are hypersensitive and that it’s too difficult nowadays to speak freely or discuss difficult issues.

“We invented political correctness to make fun of ourselves,” Steinem said, “because we were inventing new words and trying to be inclusive and so on, and doing it with a sense of humor. But the whole point is inclusion, so it doesn’t make sense to me that being incorrect and exclusive is desirable. We’re trying to think of more creative, humane, kind-hearted ways to be inclusive.”

Eventually, the conversation circled around to the fact that many Americans are not particularly excited about Trump or Clinton and lament what they consider the absence of really good candidates on the ballot.

Couric asked Steinem why she thought more people were not embracing public service enthusiastically and going into politics.

“Well, first of all you take a lot of punishment,” Steinem replied. “Look what’s happening to Hillary.”

Secondly, she said, the image of politics as a hotbed of corruption and ineffectiveness has been around since the Nixon administration.

“We’ve been told consciously ever since Nixon that politics is dirty, your vote doesn’t count, which was the campaign he launched to depress the voter turnout,” Steinem said. “That is absolutely untrue. It happens that the voting booth is the only place on Earth where the least powerful and the most powerful are equal.

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This is an interesting read

Matt  Bai
National Political Columnist

August 18, 2016

Like many of you, I took a short summer vacation last week, hoping to clear my mind of politics and draw some perspective on human affairs from the calming rhythm of the ocean.

Except that all anyone on the beach seemed to be talking about was a certain loudmouth celebrity, and all the surf shops were selling “Make America Great Again” T-shirts, and all the kids were building “huge” sand castles with walls around them.

Even the clouds overhead seemed to assume a certain Trumpian shape this season, like wispy comb-overs drifting out to sea.

It brings me no pleasure to report that Trump has achieved his ultimate goal in life (and of his campaign), which is to become the most unavoidable human on the planet. When it comes to his lesser objective of actually becoming president, however, success is looking more remote.

If last year gave us the Summer of Trump, then this is the Summer of Trump’s Unwinding.

Even as I sat on the beach, in what was supposed to be among the least eventful weeks in any presidential year, Trump suggested that some gun lover might just have to assassinate his opponent, then managed to push that controversy aside with an accusation that President Obama literally founded ISIS, then said he was only being sarcastic, then said not that sarcastic, then declared himself the victim of a media conspiracy.

(This last part would have been more convincing had Trump not premised his entire campaign on exploiting celebrity-obsessed media for free coverage, without which he would by now be back to the business of pretending to fire game-show contestants from pretend jobs.)

All of which brings me back to this question of why Republican leaders in Washington continue to stand with Trump. I’ve already made the case, both seriously and satirically, that their endorsements are morally unsound and reckless for the country.

Increasingly, though, it seems to me that on a purely strategic level, where the future of the party is concerned, the never-abandon-ship approach is making less and less sense.

It’s easy to see how Trump’s candidacy might put you in an impossible position if you’re running for reelection to the Senate in, say, New Hampshire or Florida. You really can’t win if you antagonize either Trump loyalists or Trump haters, so you start to say stuff that makes you sound lobotomized, like: I’m going to help Trump become president so I can then thwart his ambitions.

(No joke — this is exactly the desperate logic that Kelly Ayotte, New Hampshire’s poor junior senator, tried out the other day. We’ll see how that goes.)

My favorite new entry in the awkward-straddling category, by the way, comes from Mark Sanford, the always interesting South Carolina congressman, who wrote in a sober op-ed this week that while he supports Trump, he remains deeply troubled by the nominee’s refusal to turn over his tax returns.

Let me get this straight: You’re OK with him sort of banning Muslims from the country, or attacking a judge for being of Mexican descent, or accusing the president of organizing terrorists, or hinting at the necessity of political violence, or mocking the disabled, or not knowing the first thing about the nuclear arsenal. Check, check, check, check, check and check.

But you’re holding the line at him not disclosing his effective tax rate. Because that’s just un-American.

Leaving all that aside, though, let’s focus for the moment on Paul Ryan, the nominal leader of what used to be called the Republican establishment in Washington, before the Trump family staged its shareholder revolt.

Ryan’s calculation, in concert with fellow Republican leaders Mitch McConnell and Reince Priebus, seems to be that anything is better than all-out disunity. Trump has, after all, brought legions of new voters into the Republican fold this year, and he’s a powerful lure for small-dollar fundraising.

If you reject all that, the thinking goes, you risk inciting a new wave of divisive and potentially calamitous primaries in House and Senate races. Trump’s probably not going to win in November anyway, and party leaders want to be able to move on with an intact party and maybe even an expanded, energized base.

But let me offer an alternative way to look at it. Because it seems to me that this strategy ignores everything we know about pop-up political movements fueled by a combination of rage and Wi-Fi.

What Republicans should have learned from the tea party uprising is that you don’t really appease or absorb these kinds of rebellions. Their guiding principle is to upend party establishments, which is why John Boehner is home in Ohio now, despite having twisted himself like a yogi to avoid alienating the party’s angriest new voices.

Ron Paul’s voters didn’t become party loyalists. Neither did Ted Cruz’s. And Trump’s won’t, either.

Ryan could spend every one of the next 81 days campaigning for Trump, and Trump’s new voters would still walk away looking for ways to blow up the status quo, or else they’d walk away from politics entirely. What they won’t do is suddenly see the wisdom of responsible governance and run down to the local party office to see how they can help reelect their congressman.

On the other hand, by not more explicitly renouncing Trump’s increasingly appalling campaign, Ryan and the others may well be fumbling the more genuine opportunity to expand their party’s appeal.

More and more Americans, and particularly younger voters, are wary of party politics, mainly because they suspect — rightly — that leaders too readily subvert Americans’ overarching interests to their own partisan agendas. This is, at the moment, a much larger problem for Republicans than it is for Democrats.

According to the latest data from Pew Research, only about a third of the public sees the Republican Party favorably. (The Democratic number is more than 10 points higher.)

If Ryan, as the country’s ranking Republican, were to finally say enough is enough — that, whatever the consequences to himself or his party, he could no longer endorse Trump’s candidacy and hope to teach his children anything about decency and public service at the same time — then he would send a powerful signal to those voters. He’d be saying that conscience still exists in politics, which is exactly what Cruz got across in his convention speech, and I’m betting it serves him well.

If you want to know what standing on principle does to your credibility with voters, look at John Kasich in Ohio. He pointedly declined to endorse Trump or attend his convention down the street, and his approval rating is near 60 percent while other governors are tanking.

Oh, that’s right, I forgot. Ohio doesn’t look anything like the rest of America. Never mind.

Trump may yet have a surge in him; I’m not saying he doesn’t. But it sure looks like the ship is going down, and if you’re Ryan, you have to ask yourself how you want to be viewed when you step before the cameras during that first showdown over President Clinton’s agenda next year.

Do you want to be the guy who preserved unity at all costs, even though you had to swallow your convictions? Or do you want to be the guy who decided, when it wasn’t an easy thing to do, that American and personal values came before party discipline?

There’s little question in my mind about where Ryan’s heart is. As this long, bizarre summer draws to a close, political instinct ought to be telling him the same thing.

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