Sunday, September 28, 2008

The Debates Part 1

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Well, hopefully I wasn't alone in watching the first Presidential Debate away from the jabbering nonsense filled cable news channels. PBS had, in my opinion, the best coverage of the debate as they had the fewest graphics on screen and I get an HD version of PBS.  C-Span was going to be my first choice but even they had a big graphic in the middle of the screen while PBS only had a faint watermark on the bottom right.

I couldn't help but pop over to the cables noise networks to see what intricate idiocy they had come up wih and CNN, you won hands down.  Not only did they have a FoxNewsish "live opinion tracker" that Frank Luntz has gotten so good at displaying, but they also had 6 pie charts that allowed 6 CNN experts like Paul Begala, Donna Brazile and some other CNN pundits give the canadidates plus/minuses throughout the debate.  The sole issue of interest here was the enormous amount of deviation between the pundits.  While some gave the candidates 3 or 4 pluses each and about as many minuses, Donna Brazile felt that McCain had over 15 pluses and Obama more than 20.  What CNN didn't realize was that any quantification of opinion is quite meaningless without some standardization.  Perhaps if Wolf had chosen the moments for them to pick, or the question that they should judge it would have made some sense.

So CNN, thank you for dumbing things down lower than even FoxNews. 

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