Archives for November 2012

– On our last blog, Lee and I used to make fun of right wingers. Matt Manweller was on the top of the list. And ick for ever to that guy.

– Melissa McEwan’s take on the John Koster story.

– Seattle’s plans for the storm season.

– Being wrong is the most important thing for conservative pundits.

– It’s a better world.

– I didn’t know anything about assassin bugs before reading this post.

I’m a pretty harsh critic of The Seattle Times. I think their coverage is more biased for a corporate status quo than they’ll care to admit and their editorials are sloppy and often off the mark. And with the ad for McKenna, they’ve put their partisanship on display.

But I don’t get any joy from their declining circulation numbers. For the best corrective to the Seattle Times’ sloppy efforts is better competition. When I read that they’d fallen off of the top 25 papers in the country, I thought of George Orwell’s lament at the end of World War Two that London only had 12 daily papers.

It is only when there are large numbers of newspapers, expressing all tendencies, that there is some chance of getting at the truth. Counting evenings, London has only twelve daily papers, and they cover the whole of the south of England and penetrate as far north as Glasgow. When they all decide to tell the same lie, there is no minority press to act as a check. In pre-war France the press was largely venal and scurrilous, but you could dig more news out of it than out of the British press, because every political faction had its paper and every viewpoint got a hearing.

Of course people get their news from the Internet now and from TV more than they did back then. But the biggest problem with TV news, with the Seattle Times, and most other daily papers in the region, is that they’re reporting from a similar perspective.

Well, it’s been something of a rough week for me. But I am mostly recovered now, I’ve been off narcotics for almost a day, and I’ll likely be discharged this evening.

With any luck, I’ll do a new poll analysis by late this evening or tomorrow morning. I’ve entered most of the polls up through yesterday, but since they were entered under the influence of morphine, I’ll have some error checking to do.

Oh…and sorry about Kentucky thing. That’s the kind of error I usually find before posting, typically while writing up the summary of polls. But I skipped all that to get up what I figured to be the last analysis for awhile.

Just looking at the polls that have come in, I see no big shake-ups. I expect Obama will still be above a 90% probability of winning and somewhere around a mean of 300 electoral votes.