That “Liberal Media” at Work Again
Posted by
KTK
The Washington Post - once a crown jewel of the newspaper profession - has been slowly descending into sheer hackery. This is only more of the same:
About 44 percent of Michigan Democrats voted against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) yesterday in the party’s primary, with the vast majority of that group marking “uncommitted” on ballots that did not include any other major candidates. . . .
With 89 percent counted, Clinton captured 56 percent of the vote. Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio) placed third with about 4 percent, behind 39 percent for “uncommitted.”
As the story notes, the DNC voted not to seat the Michigan electors, in response to Michigan’s moving its primary date ahead of other states in the traditional schedule. As a result, most of the Dem candidates did not bother to put their names on the ballot there, so many voters had no way to vote for their preferred candidate. The ballot includes a line for “Uncommitted”, and many voters chose that either because they had no other candidate or as a protest vote against Hillary.
Given these distortions, the outcome isn’t that meaningful. But there was a vote, and it was overwhelmingly for Hillary. So what did the Post have to say about it?
Now, this is not just an obvious example of putting the worst possible spin on things - it isn’t even reasonably representative of what happened in political terms. Their 44% includes all the “Uncommitted” votes and any vote for any other candidate, write-in or otherwise - that is, everyone who didn’t vote for Clinton. But of course that means that 56% of the voters did vote for Clinton (as they do in fact report - in the last paragraph). This is a landslide by most reckonings. It’s hard to tell whether this represents her real level of support there, since it is distorted both by the fact that she was the only competitive candidate on the ballot (which would likely increase her support) and by the fact that her enemies were pushing the “Uncommitted” line as a way of hurting her (tending to reduce her total). But the fact remains that well over half the voters in the state voted for Hillary when they had other options on the ballot.
There are plenty of ways they could have expressed this:
“56% Vote in Favor of Clinton”
“56% Vote Against All Democrats Other Than Clinton”
“Over 90% of Voters With a Preference Chose Clinton”
“Hillary Fans Swamp Naysayers 3:2″
“96% Vote Against Kucinich”
But the Post deliberately put it in terms that reflected negatively on Clinton even when she overwhelmingly won the (admittedly pointless) race. They went as far as they could to find the most negative spin they could put on it, even to the point of absurdity (”Well Under Half of Voters Oppose Landslide Winner!”). And this is what still passes for a liberal paper.
