It started with CNN deleting the poll they ran which shows Bernie Sanders massively crushing Hillary. Then CNN started deleting comments about it, and with criticism of CNN pundits all handing Hillary the debate win.
My article, Sanders Crushes in EVERY Post Debate Poll -- 7 Different Poll Results, reported on the uniform response by viewers. Yet almost all the sites that ran the polls went on to say that Hillary Clinton won the debate. So did the NYTimes, the Wall Street Journal and a lot of other news organizations.
I've concluded that there is a concerted effort by the mainstream media to sell a narrative. That became screamingly obvious to people who paid attention after the debate. But it's worse. Keep in mind who pays for political polling-- news organizations-- mainstream news organizations, oh, and political parties and candidates. Two organizations are getting out of the political polling business-- Gallup and Pew-- probably the two most trusted polling orgs. My polling expert tells me they are getting out because polling is harder than ever. You can't rely on calling land lines, especially since people under 35 mostly use mobile phones.
Add to that the situation I wrote about in this article: DNC Revealed as Un-democratic, Top-Down Authoritarian Election Rigging Fiefdom Run By Hillary Insiders
So we have a situation where we have less checks on polling and more polling for media. And we know the budget controllers for media are employed by the mega-corporations which own them.
Bottom line we have news orgs using pundits who are all pushing the following narrative, message and story:
Hillary Clinton is the inevitable Democratic presidential candidate. Hillary is winning Bernie Sanders is an oddball socialist who has no chance of winning Bernie Sanders is not making progress Hillary is a liberal, progressive Sanders is a Communist and extremist
I'm sure my list is incomplete, and hopefully, our commenting community will fill it in. But let me go on to talk about how this is coming down.
There are so many ways that polls can be manipulated. Polls are built by deciding how to compose the balance of the polling group. How many men, women, how many of each age, city, rural, suburban. There are so many factors that can be played with. They can pick a decent mix of males and females, but if they go with suburban women, instead of urban women, there will be a big difference in the result.
I've seen, again and again, how pollsters sell and maintain a message and leave out or damage candidates by what they do and don't do. Leave a primary candidate out of a poll and you don't show how he performs against the opposition candidates. Lately, some pollsters are finally including match-ups with Bernie Sanders, but even a week or two ago, they were matching up undeclared Joe Biden but not Sanders.
My point is, the mainstream media-- all the networks, Time Magazine-- perpetrated a lie to sell Hillary. The same mainstream media fund and direct the focus of polls.
That's the bad news-- and it's very bad news for America and democracy. But it's really not new, just screamingly evident and obvious. That's the good news-- that we can be aware of it and deal with it.
Update-- I was reviewing this excerpt of my 2013 interview with Bernie Sanders, So I asked Bernie Sanders about Bottom-up, and it seems to really fit. I asked him to comment on OpEdNews, but he replied talking about progressive media in general, as well as OEN."Well I think you guys do a great job. One of the issues we didn't touch upon is a situation which is becoming worse, and that is Corporate control over the media: fewer and fewer large conglomerates controlling what we see here or read. So if ordinary people are going to get a different point of view, a point of view which reflects the needs of the Middle Class and working families, to an increasing degree that we are going to have to go the Progressive media. You guys do a great job, and I appreciate what you do."
The bad news is the Democratic Party has made a bad faith move, putting a Hillary Clinton supporter, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz-- in charge of the DNC and she's limiting the number of debates and set a new, never-before issued rule that candidates can't participate in non-sanctioned debates.
The good news is Wasserman-Schultz is so bad that two deputy DNC chairs have called her on her lies and bad faith actions. That's begun to put pressure on the Democratic party and it offers a strategy that could lead to greater leverage that could lead to ousting Wasserman-Schultz and righting a crooked DNC ship.
How do we deal with a dishonest, misleading mainstream media and a corrupt DNC leadership intent on manipulating the presidential election?
The answer is to go bottom-up to counter the top-down, old mainstream media.
There's one last thought I want to add. It used to be that exit polls were a routine part of voting day. Then, as computerized, electronic voting was infamously mandated by congress, the exit polls stopped being predictive or reliable. So, instead of questioning the poll results, as they should have, the MSM accused election integrity activists of being conspiracy theorists (Chuck Todd, off the top of my head.) So we don't have exit polls anymore. And now, we are stuck with a media system that gives us every reason not to trust or believe political polls, which used to be another safety measure keeping tabs on things.
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