1115.org

The President’s speech last night was notable for nothing, except another round of manipulation and the construction of yet more Potemkin villages.

In their never ending quest for hard news, CNN pulled out all the stops, even commissioning a special Gallup poll for the occasion.

Polling, presumably even for Gallup is a science. What would explain this then?

Bill Schneider: “Now, this not a random sample of the American public. People who watched the president’s speech were more likely to be Republicans. . . .
“And here’s something interesting . . . a thousand people told us — told the Gallup poll that they intended to watch the speech. But when we contacted them after the speech, only a third of them actually watched. There are a lot of other things people do on a summer evening.”

Opinion research at this level is comparable to going door to door in my neighborhood and asking everyone whether they preferred enchiladas or Swedish meatballs for dinner and then, as an afterthought, mentioning that respondents were overwhelmingly Mexican and most didn’t answer because they don’t speak English. This kind of “hard journalism” is irresponsible and insidious. The average TV viewer doesn’t pay attention to polling samples or weighting.

Media Matters documents the atrocities here.

For his own part, the President hyped a website where non-traitorous-liberal-types can show their support for the troops, if sending them to Iraq unprepared and then putting yellow ribbons on cars isn’t enough. But Dan Froomkin came up with some interesting stats from the site. Less than representative?

As of 11 a.m. ET today, the site boasted 73,216 messages received — but only 25,913 were viewable by the public .

And indeed, none of the messages I saw expressed any reservation about the war effort whatsoever.

Searching for the word shame, for instance, you find things like: “The media definitely doesn’t tell of all the good they are doing. What a shame.”

Searching for the word rotten, you get: “Don’t let the rotten news from home get you down . . . it’s only the dirty press looking for headlines.”

And searching for the word quagmire, you get nothing.

And with the news that Tuesday’s speech was the least watched of Bush’s Presidential tenure, he might have gotten lucky. The majority of the country who were “doing other things on a summer evening” were lied to one time fewer than the rest of us.