November 07, 2012

CAN'T COMPREHEND THIS

The media, even in England, was saying this was a "razor-sharp" presidential race. In another dimension, Nate Silver (from the NY Times 360 blog) crunched the numbers and while Florida is still being counted, he called 49 states correct and got the electoral college count very close--two years in a row. Someone on Huffingtonpost.com also predicted all 50 states correctly th
is year. So is it that the NY Times and Huffpo have the only journalists who are good with numbers and/or fortune-telling? Or were all the other news outlets predicting a super-close race so they'd we'd continue to watch them on TV, buy their newspapers and listen to broadcasts on the "nail-biter" which never really was one?

Because my f#cking nerves don't need it! Am I getting all conspiracy theory on you or is it also kind of odd that Obama had booked a giant victory auditorium that was jam-packed? Romney was in a much smaller hall with with a fraction of the supporters. Maybe his base fleeced when he lost and they just used tighter camera angles to make the sparse attendees look consolidated in an empty venue. But you generally need to book a large venue in advance and the size of these two venues were nowhere near close. So was the race ever even as close as the news claimed? Together, Romney and Obama spent nearly $1 billion on ads, so I guess the news had to keep people tuning . Even if they weren't really tuning in to hear the truth. From all of our news outlets except two of them? Very odd.