Speed Reading
One of the unforeseen benefits of the last election is the enormous favor conferred upon people by the outing of most of the popular media outlets. The already stretched credibility of the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, among others, visibly snapped as their blatantly partisan reportage blew up in their faces like a prank cigar.
The great favor to which I refer is the time that will be saved by the public totally ignoring any articles with their bylines. When you visit the most popular news aggregator, Google News, the majority of the linked articles are from the above mentioned sources. Once you bypass all of the detritus, spurious spin and manufactured hysteria concocted by these media outlets, taking in the day’s real news should only take 5 minutes.
Now that the initial shell shock of the loss by their favored candidate has subsided, their focus is now on the devastating effect that an incoming Voldemort administration will have on a naïve public. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
The surprising shock (to them) of electoral defeat is mainly attributed to favorable polls, which up until decision day, were convincingly pointing to a Clinton victory. You can imagine the outraged customers of the pollsters demanding refunds as if they were at Macy’s on the day after Christmas.
Pollsters haven’t had a good time of it over the past while, with the failure to predict the Brexit vote another recent yuuge failure. Legitimate sampling is an effective statistical analysis tool and properly employed is the basis for many decisions in all industries. In the case of recent political polling, I suspect that samples were taken from homogenous groups which were likely skewed towards a given response. I also suspect that the same people were tired of the same pollsters asking the same questions. After the 10th time, none of your damn business would be the box ticked.
It’s amusing then that in the linked story, a survey of 2000 people, from Chicago, was offered as proof that Americans ‘favored’ the Paris climate deal even as Trump was skeptical of it.
Chicago. To ask a question of that type to that pool of respondents is like asking frat boys on their opinion of bikinis vs burkas. The article is essentially worthless. But rather than having to read the entire story, people can make more efficient use of their time by noticing the source of the story, which in this case is, surprise, The Washington Post. As noted earlier, they can simply ignore the story and go directly to the football scores.