Sausage Press

Really, the news media is a meat grinder. It is a semi-intelligent powerful automaton meat grinder, where the meat is almost any kind of information and the stuff it puts out is the sausage they call reporting. The meat grinder must make a certain number of sausages (separated by commercials) per day so it will therefore suck in information regardless of its quality and produce output regardless of its accuracy or relevance. Furthermore, if you graded the average news source on accuracy over, say, a week, it would rarely get a grade above D minus.

This morning, considerable effort was spent by a reporter/anchor on MSNBC trying to make two commentators agree that the Obama transition team is producing, with their picks for various posts, "more of the same" as opposed to "real change." Why was she trying to do this? Because, even though it is not at all an accurate representation of reality, the actual representation of realty would not fill up any sausages, because nothing new happened in the last 18 hours or so.

If I was president, I'd have three press officers. One would be there just to feed the press whatever whatever every day that nothing else was happening. What do I mean by whatever? Whatever! Just fill the space because if you don't, they will.

The second press agent would be the one who is in on all the meetings in the white house, and is sworn to tell the truth and the whole truth no matter what, but who is allowed to talk only about things that happened more than 30 days ago. That person would go out every week and answer any lingering questions about anything anyone wants to know. The prospect of an omnipresent truth-sayer in the halls of government would certainly change the way things are done. The third press agent, working on day to day news when there is news, would be the person who goes out there and reports the current news as best as one can, handling questions as best as one can, with the expectation that some information will be withheld. For now.

My day to day press agent ... the one working on day to day news when there is news ... would be Howard Feinman (Newsweek). My sausage feeder would always be the newest intern working in the press office. My Truth Sayer would be, naturally, Rachel Maddow.

...

I could go on. But for now, I just wanted to point out a typical example of a sausage that I heard on our local news this morning. The reporter noted the number of votes separating Franken and Coleman in the current recount for the Minnesota Senate race. Then he noted that the number changes every day . Then he noted the number of challenges so far by each camp (just under one thousand each).

Then he said, and I paraphrase accurately and I'm not kidding: "The number separating the two candidates will continue to change because the candidates continue to issue challenges as the recount continues."

In this statement we learn that the number of votes per candidate changes because of the challenges. Direct simple causation, no other factors. And of course, this is wrong.

The number f votes per candidate changes because the count comes up with different numbers. The challenges can indirectly affect the number because they are taken out of the picture and no longer counted for either candidate, but most challenges are actually instances of votes being taken out of the "other" pile ... the votes that had not gone for either candidate. The number of votes per candidate is changing mainly because of changes that have little or nothing to do with the challenges. The vast majority of changes in number are over votes that the machines rejected but that any normal human being (i.e., an election official or a democrat, not a Republican) can see are for one or the other candidate.

How do they get this stuff wrong?

Anyway, yes, there has been another set of numbers distributed. I will give you the latest graph in a few minutes.