Election Methodologies Discussion WARNING: HERE BE DRAGONS!!!

[Karro]

Ok, I was being a little over-exaggerative there.. more truthfully of what I'ld like/ what I meant is,

The media's affiliations should have nothing to do with how they cover the candidates and the topics they cover.

If you noticed in this election, everytime they talked to/about Obama, they held him up on a pedestal (oh god, it's so historic, the first black prresident! ...or possibly female vp..) and everytime they talked to/about McCain they would grill him on all the tough questions!

Where were those tough questions for Obama!? I watched the debates, neither candidate ever gave a clear answer to any question asked!

I respectfully disagree that there were not some very hard questions asked of both candidates. Though I had mostly made my own decision relatively early, some of the hard questions asked made me second guess and decide for myself whether those issues brought up were ones I was concerned about. It's up to us as voters to decide whether we think those questions were answered appropriately.

Anyway, I agree that the media's affiliations oughtn't enter into their reporting. However, as I said, I think that's an intractable problem, since human beings by their very nature are biased beings. That being said, one means of combatting the problem is by increasing transparency and disclosure in the media (i.e. the media fully disclosing whom they support and why, so that media consumers can judge the news they receive via that media through the filter of that knowledge). The problem with this, however, is it violates the principle of a secret ballot by exposing the voting paterns of those in the media.

On the other hand, it is relatively easy to discern the general political leanings of any given media outlet, I think. And this fact has contributed to another problem: people on the right get their news predominately from news sources that have a rightward leaning reporting, and people on the left get their news from leftward leaning media. The result is a politically segregated information gap, where each side is only informed by their own echo chambers. I actually make it a personal pursuit to seek out news and ideas from the opposite side--which actually lead me to, at least temporarily, change my political leanings during this election cycle--but this isn't the kind of thing you can mandate... You can't force the media to be completely unbiased, really, and you can't force voters either to inform themselves or, when doing so, to inform themselves in an unbiased fashion.