[ceejayoz]

> They messaged that Hillary was in the lead before primaries even began based on predicted super delegate numbers.

Which was true.

> They claimed with over 90% certainty that Hillary would win the election on election day, even when it was obvious to casual observers such as myself that that number was totally wrong.

Even election day doesn't necessarily prove that "wrong". 90% chance of Hillary winning means a 10% chance of Trump winning. If I draw a red ace of clubs out of a deck of cards, I don't go "that's statistically unlikely, fake news!"

It appears that 538's model was better, in hindsight, as he appears to have been correct to give more credence to the chances of a multi-state polling miss. It's not clear the NYT's model was necessarily wrong, through.

[colordrops]

> Which was true.

Except that it was not. Superdelegates had not yet cast their vote.

You seem to be defending the news coverage. Do you also want to respond to the WP Bernie posts, or are you going to conveniently ignore that one?

[untog]

> Superdelegates had not yet cast their vote.

The superdelegates were always going to vote for Hillary. Everyone involved, Bernie included, knew this. You might say that's very unfair and I'd agree with you, but surely the problem here is the Democratic party's delegate system? It seems very odd to blame the media when they were simply reporting the accurate facts on the ground. Should they also refrain from reporting polling numbers? After all, those too can change in time.

[colordrops]

If the media didn't report the super delegates as in the bag, and didn't surreptitiously do everything they could to bias their coverage toward Hillary, and Bernie won the primaries in a landslide, do you really think the super delegates would still cast their votes for Hillary? Do you not see the flaw in this logic?

[pwinnski]

Yes, in fact. Many of the superdelegates had already said so publicly. Their votes are, by design, not bound by practicality. All media coverage combined had negligible effect on superdelegate votes, if any at all.

The Democratic party did wrong by Bernie Sanders, unquestionably.

The media generally made errors in their coverage of the entire election cycle. But there are reasons for the media's inability to understand the dynamics at play, and acting as if the media were complicit with the Democratic party is assuming facts not in evidence.

Meanwhile, direct comparisons between the Washington Post and Fox News is a false equivalence.

[colordrops]

> the media were complicit with the Democratic party

But the were. There is plenty of evidence. In fact CNN was caught red-handed giving Hillary town hall questions in advance.

And who said anything about Fox news? What are you talking about?

[colordrops]

BTW what do you think of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLuO1qDkoNg

[ceejayoz]

> Superdelegates had not yet cast their vote.

So? We consider "x is likely to happen" to be legitimate things to cover everywhere else. We knew which way the superdelegates were likely to break, just as we often know which way the Supreme Court is likely to rule.

> Do you also want to respond to the WP Bernie posts, or are you going to conveniently ignore that one?

Lacking information on the max negative-per-day re: Trump and Hillary, and lacking information on the max overall posts in a day, I have no useful information to evaluate that one. I'd suspect both Trump and Hillary have had more than 16 negative WaPo headlines in a day.

[colordrops]

Media coverage is pretty much the only input that most people have when making a decision on who to vote for. It's a well known phenomenon that people vote for winners. Portraying someone as a winner will heavily bias the population to vote for them. It would be complete denial of reality or intellectually dishonest to claim that media doesn't heavily influence the vote. Why else would billions be spent on media campaigns?

And I can tell you that I recognized the anti-Bernie coverage before I ever saw that FAIR post. I specifically looked for negative Hillary coverage on the WP around that time and was hard pressed to find more than one slightly negative article every other day. I eventually googled on WP being slanted against Bernie and found that FAIR article.

[syshum]

>>Portraying someone as a winner will heavily bias the population to vote for them. It would be complete denial of reality or intellectually dishonest to claim that media doesn't heavily influence the vote

While that is sometimes true, and I think the media was hoping that would be true it back fried in 2016, because very few people voted for Trump, they voted against Clinton.

The media claiming every day that Clinton was the for gone winner made people that desperately wanted anyone but Clinton to win to come out to vote in droves. And no it was not because she was a women, it was because she was a terrible candidate the has Elitism poring out of every word she uttered.

//For the Record I never vote R or D, I always vote a 3rd party, 2016 was Libertarian Party.

[colordrops]

Sure, sometimes these media campaigns backfire. I do think Hillary got more support than she would have without the billion dollar push, but it was still a poorly executed campaign and doesn't negate the fact that media campaigns can change people's perceptions.