Oops!

So, once again, the pollsters have led us down the primrose path only to say, “Oops!” and leave us with that we-thought-you-loved-us feeling in the pit of our stomachs and a dozen wilted yellow roses. “Obama Has Double-Digit Lead in New Hampshire”, the news nerds shouted from the highest mountains less than 48 hours before the polls opened. And yet, there’s Hillary Clinton squeaking out a narrow but important victory on primary day.

Who is to blame? You are.

If you’re reading this, well, first of all, thank you. Secondly, you’re one of the tens of millions of us (myself included) who LIVE for this crap. You check your favorite news sites every day. You’ve got favorite channels pre-programmed into your remote control, and you flip between stations at a speed only an obsessive-compulsive who has just eaten a full box of Count Chocula can fully appreciate. You give yourself knuckle cramps “googling” the blogosphere looking for that edge, that little nugget of information that puts you in the know hours or even minutes before the news breaks. You collate information, opinions, and statistics to formulate theorems, develop postulates, and calculate proofs to gain insight into the most important decision this country makes every four years.

And because this InfoGigaRumorTainmentPalooza is not only the ultimate interactive video game but a cannibalistic mobius loop, you read what they write and then write something yourself, which they read and write something else which you read, and the process starts all over again. So before long, a news agency in London writes a rumor, you repeat the rumor on your blog, which is read along with the London source by a news agency in Tokyo and turned into a story citing two informed sources, which is then quoted in London the next day as confirmation of the rumor that they printed the day before!

And because you and millions of others like you feed at this trough pretty much 24/7, and the speed at which this information travels the globe is now measured in keystrokes, news organizations are beating the snot out of each other trying to be first on the block with the latest scoop. So forget credible sources, forget journalistic integrity (as if that isn’t the ultimate oxymoron), forget the truth: get it on the air, get it on the web, and get it there FAST. If we’re wrong nobody will notice; but if we’re RIGHT, we get to say we were FIRST!!! THAT’S what’s important…

Why do they do this? Again, it’s your fault. Your eyes and ears mean advertising dollars for these sluts. Sure, the news room is all about bragging rights: they could give two hoots if the parent company ever made a dime. But the nerds that get hired for the news room are the ones most likely to chew their own reproductive organs off for a scoop — because the suits know the value of a scoop in dollars and cents. So what do we get on the air and on the web? The lowest quality schlock that can be put up faster than everyone else’s low-quality schlock.

Result: poll results that are, umm, wrong. Really damned fast, but wrong.

So don’t come crying to me if you feel like your hamster got run over when the final tallies come through in November. Because you asked for it.