Yes, God DOES have a special place in hell reserved for “journalists.”
If you’ve got some naive place left in you somewhere that thinks that the media really is actually trying to report the news objectively and accurately, this ought to send it to that psychological trash bin where you’ve put Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and other fairy tales:
Media Put 18,000 in Not-Quite-Full 5,000-Seat Arena for Obama in Wisconsin
by Joel B. Pollak22 Sep 2012President Barack Obama is having trouble drawing large crowds on the campaign trail. At the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, his campaign was forced to move his acceptance speech from the 74,000-seat Bank of America Stadium to the 20,000 Time Warner Cable Arena, citing weather as the excuse. But the media are always eager to help–for example, putting 18,000 people inside a 5,000-seat arena at an Obama event in Milwaukee on Saturday.
The contradiction was first noted by battlegroundwatch.com. Local media, including the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, reported that Obama had addressed “supporters who filled the 5,000-seat BMO Harris Pavilion, along with thousands more who sat in bleachers and stood on the pavement beyond the protection of the roof, even as wind and rain lashed down in the latter moments of the near 30-minute speech.”
The pavilion was not “filled”–a local reporter for Patch.com filmed empty seats in the bleachers at the side of the arena (see above). Nevertheless, the Journal-Sentinal played it safe, putting attendance at roughly 5,000-plus, a small but respectable turnout.
That’s not how national media covered it. Darren Samuelsohn of Politico reported that the president addressed “a crowd the Obama campaign estimated at 18,000 in a city park overlooking Lake Michigan” in an attempt to “lock up” Wisconsin.
Laura Meckler of the Wall Street Journal–whose news section, according to UCLA professor Tim Groseclose, is the most liberal of any major mainstream outlet–repeated the campaign’s 18,000 claim without even revealing the source of the official-sounding estimate.
Both outlets described the location of the rally as a “park,” without revealing the name of the arena itself, which would have given the game away.
The images provided by news wires are predominantly close-up shots such as the one above, showing Obama surrounded by a small circle of supporters. Only Getty Images has a wider shot, similar to images at the left-wing message board Democratic Underground that show the inside of the arena. That’s a full-ish arena, but nowhere near 18,000 people.
There seem to be no images at all of the 13,000 people who supposedly made up the difference outside the BMO Harris Pavilion.
(I’ll be happy to correct this article if anyone can find any.)
Meanwhile, the nation is being told that Obama drew a massive crowd–nearly the size of the crowd at his acceptance speech in Charlotte–in a crucial swing state six weeks before the election is over.
If Obama were really doing so well, why would the media have to resort to such distortions?
And why would he be in Wisconsin in the first place?
Perdog has a pictorial illustration for us as to just how profoundly wrong and obviously beyond biased the mainstream media is in its “counting”:
The 0bumugabe Rally
What 18,000 person crowd looks like
BMO Harris arena has a maximum seating capacity of 5,000 – with a capacity of 2,500 in the lower (blue) gallery and another capacity of 2,500 in the upper gallery:
I guess the media counts Obama crowds the way the Democrat Party counts Obama votes – you know, all the dead people count, too.
It’s also how they “count” unemployed people to come up with 8.1%, of course.
The mainstream media is coming up with utterly bogus polls that dramatically oversample Democrats in order to create an illusion of inevitability which they hope will discourage voters (the way Obama has discouraged workers resulting in artificially low unemployment numbers) to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s part of the same lie that results in an unfilled 5,000 capacity arena holding 18,000 Obama worshipers.
The fact of the matter is that there is a HUGE enthusiasm/turnout gap this year favoring Republicans:
CBS Poll: GOP Has Huge Turnout Edge Over Dems
by Mike Flynn19 Sep 2012, 9:15 AM PDT
One of the chief reasons the media is so mistaken in their zeal to proclaim Obama the election winner is that most of the polls they’re basing their predictions on are wildly inflating Democrat turnout. The overwhelming majority of media polls are an assuming an electorate that is at least as Democrat as the one in 2008, with many polls assuming a higher Democrat turnout. This is just daft. The latest CBS poll of 3 swing states is the most recent to show that GOP has a huge turnout advantage over Democrats.
Yesterday, CBS/NYT released its latest Quinnipiac poll of Colorado, Virginia and Wisconsin. With the exception of CO, the polls had heavy Democrat skews, so the head-to-head match-ups aren’t particularly informative. What was telling though was the differences in enthusiasm between the two parties.
In all three states, a majority of Republicans say they are more enthusiastic about voting this year, compared to about a third of Democrats who are. In Colorado and Virginia, GOP voters are more enthusiastic than Democrats by a 15 point margin. In Wisconsin, GOP enthusiasm outpaces Democrats by 16 points.
Particularly interesting is that GOP voters have become more enthusiastic about voting in the past month. GOP enthusiasm has increased 9 points in CO, 10 points in WI and 12 points in VA. Democrat enthusiasm, meanwhile has increased only modestly; 5 points in VA, 4 in WI and 10 in CO (from a very low 28% of Democrats who were more enthusiastic about voting).
If these trends continue, today’s head-to-head numbers will be wildly off base, as the electorate this November will be very different than the one that voted in 2008.
Keep in mind, GOP voters in these swing states have become more enthusiastic about voting in the midst of a weeks-long assault on Romney by the Democrat-media industrial complex. Since the beginning of the Democrat convention, the media have reported that Obama was surging, Romney was flailing, and the election was all but over. And yet, GOP voting enthusiasm increased.
The media reports of the death of the Romney campaign are not just exaggerated, they are flights of fantasy made up from whole cloth. GOP voters are clearly ready to rumble this fall.
Not only is Republican enthusians – which WILL show up in turnout on election day – far higher than Democrats’, but Rasmussen just measured the highest number and percentage of Republicans EVER recorded in its history:
During August, 37.6% of Americans considered themselves Republicans. That’s up from 34.9% in Julyand 35.4% in June. It’s also the largest number of Republicans ever recorded by Rasmussen Report since monthly tracking began in November 2002. The previous peak for the GOP was 37.3% in September 2004. See History of Party Trends.
You’ve got to realize that the mainstream media has been increasingly blatantly dishonest propagandists and simply ignore the polls and get out and vote.
They think they can help Obama with their version of Jedi mind tricks. And of course they might be right. It’s up to you to ignore “the gang of 500” and keep them from hijacking America yet again.
Tags: BMO Harris arena, media bias, oversampling Democrats, Polling, propaganda
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