Say Anything Blog

I wonder if these people ever listen to themselves?

Not only was Chris Matthews quick to bring up ethnicity as the cause of the polls being so wrong in New Hampshire, leading to the prediction that Obama would win by double digits, Tom Brokaw blamed dishonest voters for the results:

During MSNBC’s live New Hampshire primary night coverage, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw warned that poll results getting ahead of the voters could turn the public against the media, but then blamed the inaccurate polling on how “people probably are not as honest with pollsters.” Chris Matthews, who urged an “inquest” on the polls which all had Barack Obama well ahead of Hillary Clinton in the Granite state when Clinton actually won, saw “an ethnic factor here.” Matthews extrapolated on his theory involving “Archie Bunker,” the bigoted 1970s TV character: “I’ve always thought that pollers, people, pollsters who call people up and ask them how they’re going to vote, speak in perfect English, and standard English, they speak with a kind of a politically correct manner and it encourages a politically correct answer. I’ve often thought that if an Archie Bunker voice were to come over the phone, and ask people how they’re going to vote, you’d get a more honest answer.”

The main stream media just can’t stand it when they’re wrong. And it just has to be someone else’s fault.

To be fair to Brokaw, he has a warning to the media:

“We don’t have to get in the business of making judgments before the polls have closed and trying to stampede, in effect, the process. Look, I’m not just picking on us, it’s part of the culture in which we live these days. But I think that the people out there are going to begin to make judgments about us—if they haven’t already—if we don’t begin to temper that temptation to constantly try to get ahead of what the voters are deciding in many cases as we learned in New Hampshire when they went into the polling booth today or in the last three days. They were making decisions very late….

It could well be that some of those polled weren’t completely honest with the pollsters. And the reason for that could be very simple: IT’S NOT ANYONE’S DAMN BUSINESS WHO WE VOTE FOR! Not even the mighty main stream media, as crushing as that may be to their collective, monstrous egos. It’s privacy, stupid.

And ethnicity or dishonesty doesn’t have anything to do with it.