by Pam
Martens and Russ Martens
There is a
lot of handwringing in the Hillary Clinton campaign this morning and
a lot of head scratching in corporate media newsrooms over the
egregiously flawed polls that predicted a double digit win for
Clinton over Senator Bernie Sanders in the delegate rich state
primary held in Michigan yesterday. With 97 percent of the vote
counted this morning, CNN reports that Sanders took 50 percent of the
vote to Clinton’s 48 percent. (Clinton easily won Mississippi as
polls predicted accurately.)
In a poll
taken by Fox2 Detroit/Mitchell between March 3 to March 7, Clinton
was said to be leading Sanders by 21.4 points in Michigan. An
NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll had Clinton leading by 17 points
in a poll taken between March 1 and March 3. CBS/YouGov reported that
their poll taken from March 2 to March 4 had Clinton winning by 11
points.
Harry Enten
at FiveThirtyEight summed up the embarrassment this morning, writing:
“Bernie
Sanders made folks like me eat a stack of humble pie on Tuesday
night. He won the Michigan primary over Hillary Clinton, 50 percent
to 48 percent, when not a single poll taken over the last month had
Clinton leading by less than 5 percentage points. In fact, many had
her lead at 20 percentage points or higher. Sanders’s win in
Michigan was one of the greatest upsets in modern political history.”
What
explains the flawed polling? Amanda Girard of US Uncut thinks the
fact that polling was predominantly done to potential voters on their
landline phones, as opposed to mobile phones which are widely used by
Sanders’ younger supporters, may have been a factor. (We know
plenty of Millennials who don’t even own a land line phone, using
their mobile phone for calls, texting, emailing, web browsing and
photo sharing.)
We also
thought it would be worthwhile to see how corporate media handled the
upset win by Sanders on the front pages of their digital editions
this morning. Our interest was piqued after Adam Johnson of Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) wrote yesterday that the Washington
Post ran 16 negative stories on Senator Bernie Sanders in 16 hours,
including during the pivotal Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan.
Johnson produced the headlines to back up his position. AlterNet
picked up the story yesterday, generating an astounding 543 comments
and hurtling the story across social media web sites. The theme of
the typical comment: there is too much corporate control of both
media and elections in the U.S.
This
morning, gauging from the corporate media headlines, we found,
overall, what felt like a new respect for Sanders’ campaign, per
the samples below. (The Los Angeles Times headline above was the
biggest ouch for Clinton, suggesting she’s in the same boat as
Marco Rubio.)
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