You know it’s a strange new world when Gary Langer, the director of polling at ABC, attacks a Democratic polling firm. By the way, the good folks at Public Policy Polling (PPP) took the attack in stride. The firm's Tom Jensen noted that “one of the most amusing things Langer and others in his cohort claim is that polls should not be judged by their accuracy.”
One might be tempted to blame the spat on the fact that Public Policy Polling found Fox News to be more trustworthy than ABC News. If that’s all it was, it could be written off as another episode of shooting the messenger like the effort that Rasmussen Reports recently endured.
But the real story has to do with the changing media landscape, most recently on display in the coverage of the Massachusetts special Senate race.
Rasmussen Reports is a new media outlet, digital from birth, and we informed our audience that this was a race worth watching two weeks before the stunning upset victory by Republican Scott Brown in an historically very Democratic state. Our first poll showed Brown within single digits and even closer among those most likely to vote. Our coverage was picked up by all sorts of new media sources and helped define the race for those in the Bay State. Looking back, The Politico’s Ben Smith wrote, “The overwhelming conventional wisdom in both parties … was that [Democrat] Martha Coakley was a lock. It's hard to recall a single poll changing the mood of a race quite that dramatically.”
ABC has an old-school media mentality and chose not to share the news of a close race with their audience. In fact those who rely on ABC News didn’t learn anything unusual was happening in Massachusetts until just four days before the election. By that time, Rasmussen Reports and PPP both showed the race to be a toss-up but trending toward Brown, and President Obama had decided to attend a campaign rally to help Coakley's floundering campaign. - Rasmussen Reports
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