David Frum writing in the Telegraph today “Astonishing night when America chose the strong man†I read this headline as “Wrong Man†which I guess just goes to show how the media and polls can affect your view of things. There is an important message here, if only we would pay attention to it and recognise it, David Frum writes
“Reporters try to be fair. But they cannot help being creatures of their environment. The national political press tend to live in places where Bush is only slightly more popular than unvaccinated flu: Northwest Washington DC and its Maryland suburbs, Manhattan and media-favoured towns just outside of New York, and other places well served by commuter trains, latte bars, and ethnic restaurants. I live in such a place myself, and I can testify first hand to the effort it takes to remember that your neighbours do not necessarily speak for America as a whole.
So as the polls closed on the east coast after 7:30pm, a media consensus grew that Kerry was sure to win, and maybe win by 300 electoral votes or more. The images on television reinforced the consensusâ€.
When we are bombarded by the results of polling, and then reporters take those polls as being indicative of a democratic process at work BBC, and build their reports to chime with the polls, what is happening is the whole of the democratic system is being hijacked and undermined by those who hold a particular mindset. This may be considered a bit over the top, but as the American people have just shown, they do not live in the same neighbourhood as the press and their associates. No matter what the pundits in the press, media and polling organisations like to think, in a democracy it is the people who have the final say.
I understand that this basic truth is going to be very difficult for our own media elite to swallow, they have for a long time taken the view that it is they who are the true barometer of public opinion Here and mere elections are a rather inconvenient interference. Watching BBC News last night I got the distinct feeling that the main question was “what went wrong†well actually nothing went wrong, all that happened is the people in a democratic society voted for a President, the fact that they did not choose the President the media wanted is a clear indication that the media were wrong.
Today we have our own modest but vitally important ballot in the North West, where to read some of the press comments here and here the people are going to make a mistake and vote against a regional assembly. This is only a mistake as far as those who want Britain divided into regions, and if the media are suggesting that a no vote would be a mistake then of course that puts those parts of the media squarely in the yes camp, they are no longer honest purveyors of the truth but part of the government spin machine.
When the people have the chance to make their voices heard and their choices enforced, there is also democracy, and as much as many of our elites would like to deny this, and would prefer instead to have opinion polls form public opinion, just as long as it is they who are setting the questions, so that they can get the answers they want. But they still want to hide behind what they term as democracy, it is not, asking 1,250 people selected by a polling organisation, being paid by an interested party and then extrapolating that result to millions can never replace true democratic choice at the ballot box.
It is time to do away with pollsters and their crystal balls and have honesty returned to our political process. But of course that is just not going to happen, not whilst these tricks are so handy to the politicos who want to tell us all that we are out of step with the rest of the society they are so busy forcing on us.
