Fox is the mainstream media

I was watching a clip from Rachel Maddow recently. She was talking about a guy who was in Romney’s press junket, and he had a prominent birther site, though they were going with different rumors now, because you have to be pretty die-hard, or Donald Trump, to still think the president was born in Kenya.

Anyway, one thing that she said that was interesting was that the birther thing was probably very comforting if you hate Obama—don’t worry; he’s not really the president. In the same way, I think the bad information on the polls must have been very comforting.

Okay, I recently mentioned that I have seen a few firestorms on my Facebook page, which is rare, but for my sister Maria it happens all the time. One of the recent ones, and really, for her it was pretty tactful, was she asked if all of the Romney victory parties scheduled for the weekend before the election weren’t being a bit premature. That really drew a bitter response; how dare she!

(The thing is, even when she is really being a jerk, she usually has a point, and this time was no exception.)

So, that must have been very comforting for Romney supporters, and maybe it’s good that they got their celebrating in before it would have been ridiculous. That’s when they should have had the Boston Bay firework show.

The problem with it is, of course, that then there is all the weeping and gnashing of teeth later, and it hurts more because there was so much confidence going in. It was confidence without cause.

Polling is an imperfect science, but it wasn’t just Nate Silver who was showing a clear advantage to Obama. Even with questions about the popular vote, even polls that could not show Obama getting 270 still showed him with a big lead over Romney.

There were still people listening to bad sources. The polls are skewed. They are oversampling democrats. Actually, they ended up breaking down about as expected, and if undersampling was an issue, it was more likely to go the other way. Lots of younger voters use only cell phones, therefore are not getting polled and they are more likely to vote liberal.

(My household does not help, because we screen our calls and refuse to be polled. Whether that is a more common trait among Republicans or Democrats I don’t know, but it would be very difficult to determien by a telephone poll.)

I have referred to the study that shows that watching Fox makes you less informed, which is worth pondering, but it also makes you feel like you are informed, and you are in fact the only one who really knows, because all of those misguided others are being fooled by the mainstream media.

Guess what! You cannot be more mainstream than Fox. They have a successful network, both in terms of ratings and revenue. Of our local channels two are Fox affiliates and honestly I think the CBS affiliate works with Fox for the local news as well. Even the stations that are not officially affiliated with Fox are influenced by them because of the ratings power. They’re on top.

Here’s what happens when you fall for them. You believe that you are being deliberately lied to about Benghazi, you know the president is going to throw people under the bus, and then when he accepts responsibility you don’t see leadership; you see trickery. You may even be embarrassed in a national debate. And you don’t know about the many pro-America demonstrations that happened, which were touching, and were good news.

You think that the president not meeting with Netanyahu is a horrible insult, when in fact he does need to be kept in check, his own government is frustrated with him, and other Israeli officials have reiterated how supportive Obama has been of Israel.

Also, you believe in the apology tour.

There’s a lot more, but finally you believe that Romney is going to win, and get all smug about it, and then because you have this false view of the world, it looks a lot worse, where it is not just a disappointing political outcome but the beginning of the long slide of America in to the maw of Hell itself as atheist pagan welfare queens who have a dozen each of abortions and kids use their free phones to make fun of you losers with jobs while not ever saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

But, if you think that, I have good news for you. You are misinformed. Now don't you feel better?