Media FAIL: Lies, damned lies and New York Times

[UrbScotty]

The New York Times dropped a piece over the weekend titled "Small Donors Are Slow to Return to the Obama Fold," with the title being self-explanatory of the claim. So how does the Times' Nicholas Confessore justify his headline? Interviews. That's right. Not a scientific or a statistical analysis of the data donors or donation amounts to the president's re-election campaign but interviews. Interviews reinforcing professional Left talking points that 2008 supporters of the President are oh-so-disappointed and are not giving him any money.

...

He does this, even as he admits, making a satire of himself, that the president's re-election campaign, as of June, had amassed over 552,000 individual donors, 260,000 of them brand new to the Obama campaign, with an average donation of $88 and 98% of donors giving under $250. But hey, why look at the real numbers when you can base your headline on a few interviews and soundbites? This is, after all, the age of sensational, rather than evidence-based, journalism, isn't it?

Mr. Confessore not only mistakes anecdotal data for statistical evidence, he also goes on to commit one of the worst blunders of numeric analysis: comparing data at different points in the campaign.

...

Right, because all of the president's 4 million donors in 2008 had already given to him by a year and half before the election in 2008. Luckily, that data is available. At a similar point in his presidential campaign in 2007, Barack Obama had 250,000 contributors, still an impressive number. This time around, the number has more than doubled, and the number of new donors has by itself eclipsed the number of total donors at this point in 2007. So if that can be linearly projected, we are looking at a total of nearly 10 million contributors to the president's campaign when all is said and done about this election.

http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2011/09/media-fail-lies-damned-lies-and-new.html

[Warren Stupidity]

1. stopped at "professional left"

lost all credibility at that point.

[chill_wind]

5. + 1 It does save a lot of time.

[bemildred]

7. +1.

If he can't make his argument without waving spin and stereotypes around, he well deserves to be ignored.

[FiveGoodMen]

10. Me, too!

:wtf:

[Historic NY]

2. I just added $$ for the friday deadline...

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

3. Adding mine to that, especially since I'm getting a bonus for all of my hard work.

Yes!!

OBAMA/BIDEN 2012!! :toast:

[ThomCat]

4. Anecdotally,

About half the people on the left that I've asked aren't planning to give any money this time. We all did last time.

I know of several "independents" (whatever that really means), and a few republicans that are donating to Obama though.

From what I'm seeing, he really is getting more support from the right, and less from the left. That would explain why a lot of those donations are new. These are people who didn't/wouldn't give money to the democratic candidate in the last election.

It would have been better if there was some actual polling with this article though, so get a larger view of what's going on.

[FrenchieCat]

8. Your unname sources even less reliable than that of the New York Times.....

But you knew that.

[ThomCat]

12. They'll be crushed to hear that some annonymous

fanatic on the internet thinks so. :eyes:

Real liberals and progressives have better places to spend any spare money we have. I don't have much spare money anymore now that I'm on a fixed income, but the little I can spare goes to places like Elizabeth Warren's campaign, and Alan Grayson's Campaign.

[SkyDaddy7]

11. Thas funny because I know just as many who

are donating. Funny how that works.

[Demeter]

6. That's Okay. Wall Street Is Abandoning Ship, too

and for that they have hard statistical data.

[FrenchieCat]

9. Isn't that what we want.....

?

[The Second Stone]

13. Small donors aren't going to start donating until the primaries

(in this case, the Repub primary) is settled. Small donors don't give money a year in front of the election. I'm not going to donate again to Obama, but I didn't donate last time until after he beat my candidate, Hillary Clinton.