The gap between the media's version and the actual truth grows wider

PRINCETON, NJ -- Gallup Poll Daily tracking data indicate that about 11% of registered voters who plan to vote have already voted as of Wednesday night, with another 19% saying they plan to vote before Election Day. Roughly equal percentages of Barack Obama supporters and John McCain supporters have taken advantage of the early voting opportunity -- so far.

In addition to the 11% who say they have already voted, another 19% of registered voters who plan to vote say they will vote early, before Election Day. That leaves just about 7 out of 10 voters who intend to go to the polls on Nov. 4 itself.

The percentage of early voters has increased from 7% in Gallup's Friday through Sunday average, when Gallup first began measuring this variable, to the current 11% in the Monday through Wednesday average.

The pace of early voting so far appears to be roughly on par with 2004. At about this time before that year's election -- Oct. 22-24 -- 9% of registered voters said they had already voted. However, in that 2004 poll, only an additional 13% said they intended to vote early, lower than the 19% who say so in the current Oct. 20-22 average. Thus, early voting this year may end up being higher than it was in 2004. (In Gallup's final poll before the election that year, conducted Oct. 29-31, 17% said they had voted early, and another 4% claimed they were still going to vote before Election Day.) As noted above, projections from this year's data are that as many as 30% of voters could end up voting early.

But we've been hearing that the early voting was massively favoring Obama! In fact the mainstream media's attitude has been that the election would be over by election day with the early voters giving Obama a Reagan-style landslide!

NOW we find out that not only is early voting happening at about the same level as past elections where it was available but that the results are split evenly between Obama and McCain.

Could it be that the media have been reporting what they wish the truth to be rather than what it truth actually is?

To ask the question is to answer it. Of course the media is attempting to shape the outcome not just report in the process.

Do you wonder how the polls can be so all over the map with some showing Obama with a 10 point lead and others tied up? The answer is that some polls are massively oversampling Democrats. If you ask 1000 people who they are going to vote for but approached 500 of those people as they were leaving an Obama rally while randomly choosing the other 500 out of the phone book how could you show anything else but an "Obama landslide"?

The real question is why is the media going so all out this year? I mean they ALWAYS slant their coverage to favor the Democrat in a presidential race. They simply can't help themselves. Think of it this way suppose you are a reporter covering a political race. One candidate is someone you think of as a pretty good guy whose policies you mostly agree with and who you think would do well in office. The other is a Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan who campaigns in his Klan robes and features cross burnings at his political rallies and whose platform is that we need to round up all the blacks, Jews and homosexuals and gas them to death to finish the work that the great Hitler started.

On an emotional level that is how the average member of the mainstream media sees any race between any Democrat and any Republican - and I'll give you one guess which part the Republican plays in this fantasy.

Many ordinary Americans were turned off by the ugly and unfair way that Charles Gibson treated Sarah Palin in his interview. Gibson honestly doesn't understand this criticism. In his mind the fact that he didn't beat Sarah Palin to death with his bare hands and then urinate on her corpse means that he treated her far better than she deserved.

When you have that kind of mindset, and the overwhelming majority of people working in the MSM do, the fact that you aren't going on camera every day wearing your "Obama '08" t-shirt means that you are bending over backwards to be fair.

However there is still a palpable difference between how this campaign is being covered and how previous campaigns have been reported on.

This year the media is doing far less to disguise its advocacy than ever before. Some speculate that the reason for this is that the media wishes to be a part of the history making election of the first black president (as long as he is a Democrat). Others believe that they see in Obama the most overt Marxist who has ever run for the office and had a chance to win.

Both of these are right to a degree but neither explains why the media has thrown away even the pretense of journalistic integrity and made themselves so obviously an arm of the Obama campaign.

I believe that there is only one reason why so many people would so openly destroy their own characters in public view. The old or mainstream media is in the grip of a toxic blend of panic and anger over their dwindling numbers of viewers and readers and over their loss of influence with the general public.

Reporters and editors and producers car read and they know what the implications of falling ratings and subscriptions mean for their job security. They know that it took them six years to destroy George W Bush's standing with the public (and Bush had to help them by never fighting back, by signing all kinds of bad legislation, by advocating amnesty for illegal aliens and by trying to appoint Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court) where before they could have done it in two.

Reporters and editors and producers know what it means to their financial future when the largest group of people tuning in to the nightly network news broadcast or buying the daily newspaper are over 70-years-old.

They are scared and angry. Their rice bowl is being overturned and the ones doing are are talk radio and the Internet news sites and the blogs.

It was a blogger who gave CBS News a major black eye and destroyed the reputation of Dan Rather by exposing how Rather attempted to tarnish George W Bush's reputation and cost him reelection by using forged (and badly) documents.

It was talk radio and the blogs which shamed NBC into playing the full Biden video which showed Biden not only promising that electing Obama would bring about an international crisis within the first six months of his presidency but that his response would be so poor and incompetent that it would destroy his standing in the polls.

It was radio talker Sean Hannity who - a year ago - began exposing Barack Obama's close associations with deeply troubling individuals like lunitic racist hate-monger Jeremiah (God Damn America!) Wright and unrepentant violent communist revolutionary and domestic terrorist bomber William Ayers. Associations which are eroding Obama's support and will probably wind up costing him the election.

It is the blogs which expose and mock these deeply disturbing and creepily evil "Obama Youth" videos which show the absolute commonality of mindset between the most fervent Obama supporters and the fanatical followers of Adolf Hitler.

So why does the fear that they might someday have to get real jobs motivate the MSM to further their loss of respect by the general public by coming out so nakedly in support of Obama?

The Fairness Doctrine.

The Democrat party hates talk radio and the Internet just as much as the MSM. Even a Republican president as great and as beloved as Ronald Reagan could not bring about a Republican House of Representatives and could only achieve a Republican Senate for a few years.

This is because the misnamed Fairness Doctrine was in force for all but the last year of his presidency. The Fairness Doctrine was born when commercial radio was in its infancy and large parts of the nation might be served by only one radio station. It was intended to prevent radio stations who carried campaign advertisements from one candidate in a political race from refusing to carry advertisements from his opponent, or from charging that opponent a higher rate for carrying his advertisements.

Over the years as radio and then television grew the Doctrine mutated into a rule that broadcast outlets have to give "equal time to all opposing points of view". This meant that if a radio host spent ten minutes talking about why taxes were too high then the station had to allow someone to come on the air and spend ten minutes talking about how taxes were just right or even too low.

The vast majority of radio and television station owners did not care to expose themselves to the potential trouble of FCC complaints from members of the community who thought that their point of view was being given unfair treatment so most radio stations just played music and the handful of stations that operated on a talk format did straight news, traffic, sports and weather with a few radio psychologists, cooking shows and movie/theater/restaurant reviews thrown in for good measure.

The end of the Fairness Doctrine resulted in an explosion of talk radio stations and talk radio became a multi-billion dollar industry. Market forces ruled this new industry and popular shows/hosts prospered and unpopular ones fell by the wayside. The result was that talk radio became a bastion of conservatism as ordinary Americans flocked to the AM dial to hear their beliefs and ideals upheld and defended rather than relentlessly attacked and mocked, as they were relentlessly by the MSM.

This opening up of a new conduit through which information could be distributed to the public broke the monopoly which the MSM had previously held and allowed the "other side of the story" to finally be told, unfiltered, to the American people.

The result is that it is much harder for Democrats to lie and get away with it and much harder for Democrats to get elected to national office. The arrival of the Internet on the scene has only accelerated this process. What Reagan could not do talk radio and the Internet did - bring about a Republican controlled congress for 12 years (it's not new media's fault that Republicans lost control because they forgot to act like Republicans).

The MSM wishes to destroy their competition and Democrat politicians want to restore the monopoly on information distribution to people they can depend upon to lie for them. Reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on radio and television and extending it to the Internet and satellite radio will accomplish this goal.

This is the reason that the mainstream media has become so over the top in its advocacy of Obama. They realize that their newspapers and network news divisions may not be commercially viable for very much longer and they see in an Obama presidency their best and what may be their last, chance to bring back what the see as the Golden Age when they told the public what to think and no one challenged them.

Panic will cause people to do things which reason would never lead them into. As the old media tries harder and harder to drag Obama over the finish line by sheer brute force they are becoming more and more an object of contempt in the eyes of the general public and they are generating more and more of a backlash against them and their anointed candidate.

Their very efforts to restore their former power and glory are actually hastening their ultimate downfall. There is something of the Greek tragedy in all of this. Perhaps the little messiah was being ironically prophetic in giving his acceptance speech in a mock up of the Parthenon.