How the US media conjures up fake news from polls but could learn a thing from Sneem in Co. Kerry.
(Originally published in the Western People on 2024-09-24)
Favorable Ratings of Harris, Trump Remain Under 50% (Gallup Sept. 3-15 poll)
It was one of those miserable post-Christmas weeks in Kerry a few years back when a local correspondent in The Kerryman summed up the news succinctly as: “No news this week”. A grey January in Sneem, where the biggest event might be the odd sheep wandering into the village, doesn’t lend itself to breaking headlines. But as I sit here in sunny Los Angeles, in the middle of a sprawling city brimming with election fever, I’m struggling to come up with real news myself.
The TV networks and newspapers, political pundits in the media and both online and offline election reports, all seem to carry unending analysis of the presidential campaigns of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, as the days count down to the November election. The endless discussion of opinion polls, favourability ratings and swing-state election predictions give the impression of meaningful trends. Experts will warn us of the particular cause and effect result of debates, of assassination attempts, of the cutting of interest rates by the Federal reserve for the first time since 2020. The American media is desperate to make something out of nothing. Every morning, they pour over opinion polls as if divining some hidden truth in the numbers. “Harris is up by 1%! Trump’s favourability has dipped!” they shout, as if these tiny blips matter.
The truth is that polls can tell very little about the final voting intentions of the electorate. Because of the outdated (and frankly weird) electoral college voting system in the US, smaller rural states, often heavily Republican with more cows than people, have an outsized weighting of votes per-capita (such as Montana), compared to larger and more urbanised states which lean Democrat (such as California). Currently there are only about seven so-called ‘swing states’, which will ultimately decide if Trump or Harris will be the next president, as a few thousand votes either way in each will swing the balance of electoral college. Thus, as with Hillary Clinton in 2016, a candidate can win the popular vote by literally millions and still be defeated in the election for president. A fact which Donald Trump’s ego cannot abide and thus he continuously lied about widespread voter fraud even after he was elected president.
But the insane demand for news content leads the media to extrapolate trends from countless polls where no coherent trends could possibly exist. Claiming that Harris has increased her lead by a full percentage after her debate with Trump on ABC last week is simply impossible to prove. All the polls come with a margin of error — and that is before the polling companies interpret the results to correct for hidden bias etc. So in a poll with a margin of error of say three per cent, Harris at 51% with Trump at 48% or Trump at 47%, Harris at 44% or even Harris at 46%, Trump at 46% are all statistically the exact same. So no matter what trends an excited journalist or salivating political expert announces as polling news, it is neither a trend nor news. It can even be worse, when such polls are broken down into various demographic voter groups such as Black men or people with a third-level degree, as the margin of error goes up due to the smaller sampling size.
Billions of dollars of political advertising and campaigning, is being pumped into the offline and online media channels, by both campaigns (focussing clearly on the ‘swing-states’). It works cheek-by-jowl with the wall-to-wall political reporting, most usually with a clear left or right bias but again a diminishing amount of any of this is actual news as opposed to marketing, spin, propaganda, half-truths or unadulterated lies.
Mossad (Israeli secret service) detonated bombs in thousands of pagers which Hezbollah fighters were using, in a coordinated fatal attack more suited to a James Bond plotline, but which now threatens to explode the Gaza conflict and see it overspilling into neighbouring Lebanon and potentially other countries. The daring nature of the attack elevated the event to almost prime-time reporting, before Donald Trump said something again about illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, the news media are following both political parties in effectively ignoring the US Government’s involvement in supplying the war materials which the Israeli army have used to kill to effectively raze Gaza and kill over 40,000 people there. This has undoubtably included Hamas members, but also Israeli hostages and thousands of innocent Palestinian women and children — aside from those countless injured and/or mentally scarred for life. Pro-Palestinian advocates find a cold reception in either camp of both Republicans or Democrats, with the latter in particular viewing any vocal discontent as distracting from the election of Kamala Harris and doing their best to dampen media discussion down.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is set to continue into its third year, with the Ukrainians hoping their recent seizure of territory in Kursk will offset or at least slow the grinding enemy offensive in the east of their country. Yet this news too has dissipated, since the shock beginnings of Putin’s murderous campaign into an unprepared and smaller neighbour. Even in Glendale, where the war has seen an influx of both Ukrainian and Russian immigrants into this strongly-Armenian part of Los Angeles county, many ordinary Americans don’t know of any of this— aside from more than a few Spanish-speaking Latinos who may be expected to focus on their homeland for news. Last week a fellow actor spoke to a friendly girl with a big smile in Victoria Secret, within the Galleria shopping complex in Glendale, telling her she was buying some items for her friends back in Ukraine as they had no such shop there. The assistant was puzzled ‘why not?’ and when her prospective customer told her it was because of the war, she laughed and made gun gestures with her hands ‘you mean like pew, pew?’. ‘Yes’ my stunned friend retorted, ‘exactly like a war, with over 300,000 dead’. In a sudden realisation, the Victoria Secret shopping executive visibly deflated, “I’m so sorry, I never heard of any of this on the news’. With a sad pity my friend replied, ‘maybe you are better off — maybe we all are’.
So this Mayoman in America is reporting that despite his newsfeed full of people earnestly discussing the election polls; illegal Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs in Ohio, or not; a potential assassin arrested with a gun at Trump’s Bedminster golf course while he was golfing there; the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates by half a percent and the hip-hop artist Sean “Diddy” Combs facing racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking charges… there was ‘no news this week’ from Los Angeles.
But I can tell you this: the weather is great, but in a land that hasn’t seen a drop of rain since early May… I suppose that’s not really news either.