Selweski returns from the sports desk, pens blog post as if it's where he'd always worked

by: Eric B.

Tue Oct 02, 2012 at 10:43:46 AM EDT

We have a new, novel, and strange reason this morning to ignore polling that shows Willard Romney losing, losing by increasingly larger margins, and most importantly doing it in critical states ... it's in the media's best interests that you do so. It's from Chad Selweski, a recent returnee to political writing from the sports desk, in a blog post titled, "Polls unfairly dog Romney campaign."

It’s also important to note that the media, especially the TV networks, typically want a close race. They want to tease and titillate their viewers from now through Nov. 6. Normally, they especially don’t want voters to think the contest is over before the broadcast and cable networks can pack in many millions of viewers for the upcoming debates.

No problems here. In fact, it's exactly what I said in the last weekend before Jennifer Granholm mopped up the floor with Amway Guy, when the media consistently reported the contest as close. In fact, based on some of that reporting, which used the extreme fringes of the margin for error, you'd have been forgiven for thinking that Granholm was spending her last weekend before the election writing a concession speech to be delivered at 4 p.m.

However, the news coverage of the polls seems to fly in the face of past practices. The networks, and to a lesser extent the top newspapers, are banging away at a narrative that says the Romney campaign is in a “tailspin” and the polls are becoming a huge perception problem. Yet, those types of broad generalizations don’t fit the facts.

Here’s a news bulletin: In seven of the nine battleground states, Obama’s lead over Mitt Romney is within the pollsters’ margin of error.

Yes, and if you adjust the margin of error in all cases to the extreme points, you have Obama writing his concession speech. The polling narrative isn't wrong because of a liberal media conspiracy. The polling narrative is wrong because it poorly serves the best interests of the media itself.

He makes a fair point that it's September and polls can change, although for some reason he thinks the race is never actually decided until the last minute (does anyone remember things anymore, like when John McCain pulled out of Michigan around this time just four years ago, based entirely on polling, and how by the magical 11th hour the talk was whether Obama would win Indiana on his way to the White House?).

Some of us would argue that reporting mostly on polls turns the race for the White House into a horse race, and that the American people ought to be making their minds up based on how a candidate intends to enforce laws (does anyone remember 8th grade civics?), but that's besides the point. If you're going to report based on horse racing, then the narrative the media is spinning is pretty accurate ... after a series of stumbles, the horse called Willard (the $70,000 one that's a health care tax write-off for his owner) is stumbling where it most matters. It's still possible that he'll pull off an upset, but all the evidence is pointing to not only defeat for Willard, but the other horse of his stables in other races, mostly because it appears that the oats they were fed are all rancid and causing bitter stomach acid.