UNKNOWNS: Scarborough trashes Times/Siena poll!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 15, 2024

It's part of a long, winding road: At the start of Monday's report, we cited the gloomy numbers which have emerged from the latest administration of the New York Times/Siena College poll.

This morning, during the 6 o'clock hour, Joe Scarborough trashed the methodology of that survey. He cited the outlier results it has persistently generated—results which have consistently tilted in favor of Candidate Donald J. Trump.

Today's discussion of the Times/Siena survey lasted a full ten minutes. At Mediaite, Colby Hall has recorded some of what was said, and he's also provided some videotape. 

Headline included, Hall's report starts like this:

Joe Scarborough Blasts ‘Garbage’ NY Times Poll That ‘Warps Reality’: Editors Have to ‘Know What They’re Doing’

Joe Scarborough and John Heilemann engaged in a spirited yet convivial discussion over a recent New York Times Siena Poll, which showed President Joe Biden behind former President Donald Trump in several crucial swing states.

[...]

The segment opened with a number of polls showing Biden and Trump neck and neck, but the NY Times poll was followed by citing experts questioning both its methodology and findings. Scarborough and Heilemann had a polite back and forth over it until the Morning Joe host just went off on the NY Times and what he alleged was disingenuous reporting.

“The New York Times right now is actively shaping the election cycles where this poll comes out on a Sunday, and on Monday people go, ‘Oh, and I heard it,’ and I’m sitting there going, 'Oh, don’t be so stupid,' ” Scarborough said.

“There’s one poll that’s wildly skewed every time...It warps reality,” he continued. “And everybody responds to that in the media and in the political world.”

Let's state that a bit more clearly:

Scarborough cited an array of polling experts who have now questioned the methodology of the high-profile Times/Siena poll. 

According to Scarborough, the poll keeps generating results which show Candidate Trump well ahead of Candidate Biden, to an extent which isn't produced by other high-end polls. 

(We were surprised to hear him say that the Times is also involved in a second poll—a New York Times/ Ipsos poll. According to Scarborough, that poll currently shows Biden running ahead of Trump, but it's receiving less publicity from the Times itself.)

Is there something "wrong" with the New York Times/Siena poll? Scarborough quoted pushback from a lot of people who seem to think there is. 

We'll only dispute one part of what Scarborough said. We'll challenge, or at least subject to question, this part of his presentation:

 “I’m sorry, the New York Times has to know what they’re doing.”

Is the New York Times running a survey which is methodologically flawed—which thereby skews results in Trump's favor? We'd say that's certainly possible.

If so, is it obvious that people at the New York Times "have to know what they're doing?" 

We'd have to say that the answer there is no. That answer would be part of a very long story—one which goes back a long time.

Scarborough's statement assumes that basic competence exists all through the sprawling warrens of the New York Times. We know of no obvious reason to make any such assumption.

We'll start in early 1992, with the bungled front-page reporting which formed the basis for the political / journalistic era dominated by the Whitewater pseudo-scandal. 

Gene Lyons wrote the book on this bungled reporting in his 1996 book, Fools for Scandal: How The Media Invented Whitewater. 

The book began as an essay in Harper's, one  of the nation's most respect publications. When the book appeared, it was heavily promoted by Harper's.

That said, so what? The Times is a powerful, highly-respected, upper-end mainstream institution. Especially at that time, the paper was strongly tied to career advancement within the world of high-end  journalism.  

Career players may sometimes be disinclined to challenge such an organization. Despite its high provenance, the Lyons book was largely disappeared—and a crackpot political / journalistic era emerged from the Times' bungled front-page reporting.

From that point on, for whatever reason, the Times lay at the forefront of the era in which major mainstream press opinion tended to strike out at Clinton, Clinton and Gore. 

Some of the strangest journalism of the age came out of the New York Times in support of this long-running jihad. That said, did Timespeople necessarily understand how bad their journalism was?

In any individual case, we know of no reason to assume that they did. The wider reluctance to criticize or challenge the famous grey lady helped produce a dangerous and destructive world—a world in which highly suspect Storylines and frameworks made their way through the political culture in the absence of pushback, dispute or critique.

Stating what is blindingly obvious, this helped defeat Candidates Gore (2000) and [Hillary] Clinton (2016), each of whom won the nationwide popular vote. 

In that way, the history of the world has changed due to the peculiar behaviors found within the Times. That said, we know of no reason to think that the newspaper's denizens were (or are) sufficiently competent to let us assume that they "knew what they were doing" during this long stretch of time.

This morning, Scarborough assailed the ongoing Times/Siena survey. As he did, he cited criticisms of that survey from an array of polling exerts. 

For our money, he only fell short when he seemed to assume the existence of basic competence within the New York Times.

A lot of work at the Times is quite good. Down through the decades, a lot of work at the Times has also been astoundingly bad. 

The same can be said for some of what happens at Morning Joe! Tomorrow, we'll return to the theme we planned to explore before we lost a large chunk of time yesterday morning and afternoon. 

The question we'll be asking is this:

To what extent do high-end American journalists recognize the world's most basic journalistic distinction? We refer to the distinction between things a journalist can sensibly claim to be true, as opposed to other things a journalist has simply heard.

Even at the highest levels, are American journalists able to draw that bone-simple distinction? On Monday, we sketched the distinction as shown:

The world's most basic journalistic distinction: 
Things a journalist can sensibly say she knows.
Things a journalist has only heard someone claim.

Things a journalist can sensibly say she knows.
Claims which certainly could be true, but which could also be false.

There are certain claims we basically know to be true. Then too, there are unfounded claims.

Using the language of Donald Rumsfeld, it's the difference between the knowns and the unknowns! To what extent can our high-end journalists recognize this bone-simple distinction?

In the wake of Stormy Daniels' testimony last week, we were struck by the way this basic distinction was honored in the breach. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but the capabilities of us the people are extremely limited.

Tomorrow, we'll return to that basic theme. We'll start with something which was said right there on Morning Joe.

Morning Joe stages some top-notch discussions. Then too, sometimes not!

Tomorrow: Truth be told, a long, long list of unknowns