Hillary is Up by 7 in Georgia?!

I mean, this is a family blog, but the only honest response is, WTF?

"#New Georgia General Election: Clinton 44% (+7) Trump 37% Johnson 7% JMC poll http://winwithjmc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Georgia-Executive-Summary.pdf … FYI Romney won GA by 8 points"

https://twitter.com/PpollingNumbers/status/762658180010741760

This is Georgia we're talking about.

Yes, you can talk about waiting another week or two to assess how much of Hillary's bounce stays, but Georgia?

A Morning Consult poll shows her up by 8 now-she was up just 3 in the immediate aftermath of the convention.

This is why we're hearing about skewed polls already. Bill Mitchell has a barn burner:

"Imagine polls don't exist. Show me evidence Hillary is winning?"

https://twitter.com/mitchellvii/status/762497721831874561

Already Trump is warning about a rigged election. Unlike in 2012 where he waited till after Romney lost to claim it was rigged.

It's not surprising it's gone here, but so fast?

CNN's Brian Stelter did some really good work yesterday.

"Yesterday, CNN’s Brian Stelter, host of “Reliable Sources,” went after Sean Hannity for helping Trump spread the notion that the election will be rigged, and Hannity — who has been the most enthusiastic Trump supporter in major media — will no doubt fire back during his radio and television shows today. But for the idea to really take hold beyond the kind of core Trump supporters who would nod their heads in agreement if Trump told them that America Ferrera and Aziz Ansari were leading a conspiracy to rob white people of their precious bodily fluids, it needs a kind of widespread validation that it may not be able to get."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/08/08/why-donald-trump-wont-even-persuade-his-own-side-to-believe-that-the-election-is-rigged-against-him/

Turns out even Rush Limbaugh isn't buying in:

"The idea is so asinine that even the most partisan Republican would have trouble arguing with a straight face that it’s actually going to happen. That won’t stop Hannity, who long ago proved himself to be reliably mindless on any and every issue, never pretending to possess even an iota of independent thought. And he may get some support from elsewhere on Fox News. Don’t forget that this is a network that spent years flogging the story of the New Black Panther Party’s supposedly epic voter intimidation efforts in 2008, which literally consisted of a couple of guys standing outside one polling place in a heavily African American neighborhood in Philadelphia glowering at people as they went in (and by the way, nobody spent more time pretending to be outraged about that offense against democracy than Megyn Kelly)."

"But beyond that, and some other fringe sources such as conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, Trump may find it difficult to get support for his charge of a rigged election, even from some media figures you might expect to back him up. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, responded to Trump’s charge by criticizing him for sounding like a sore loser before he had even lost. “I don’t know if he’s trying to arouse sympathy here,” Limbaugh said last week. “All I know is that that doesn’t work. Nobody ever got elected anything ’cause somebody felt sorry for the way they’ve been treated or what have you.”

"And this points up a larger difficulty that Trump faces in getting his message amplified the way an ordinary candidate does. In most circumstances, when a presidential candidate comes out with a new policy or a new argument about a controversial issue, in short order the candidate gets support from nearly everyone on his or her side. Other politicians, pundits, opinion writers, radio and television hosts — all will say whenever they have the opportunity that the candidate is right about this, which sends a signal to voters about what they ought to believe and why. But since Trump has divided his own party, he can’t rely on that amen chorus to back him up and help unite Republicans behind him. Sometimes they will, and sometimes they won’t; it will depend on what he’s saying. If he says Hillary Clinton is a crook or we should cut taxes, they’re right with him. But if he says — in August, and with zero evidence to back up the claim — that the election is rigged against him, they probably won’t be."

Again, what's shocking is this is August 8. Still three months to go.

New: Trump sees a wide-ranging “Clinton machine” conspiracy to steal the election,"

https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/762632823241048064

But after that Georgia poll maybe you can understand why.

Again, Stelter had a really good show yesterday. He clearly gets the threat of false equivalence.

"Journalism's job is to probe, not hand candidate a mic. Good essay @brianstelter."

https://twitter.com/Tucson_Cowgirl/status/762326080581537793

Overall, the idea that the press has to cover this election differently seems to be taking hold.

Journalists' most sacred duty is to be true to the facts, not "balanced"

https://twitter.com/BrendanNyhan/status/762464707852632064

We've seen some major papers like NYTimes and Washington Post endorse Hillary early or at least negative endorse Trump.

"If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?"

"Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable."

"But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?"

"But let’s face it: Balance has been on vacation since Mr. Trump stepped onto his golden Trump Tower escalator last year to announce his candidacy. For the primaries and caucuses, the imbalance played to his advantage, captured by the killer statistic of the season: His nearly $2 billion in free media was more than six times as much as that of his closest Republican rival."

"Now that he is the Republican nominee for president, the imbalance is cutting against him. Journalists and commentators are analyzing his policy pronouncements and temperament with an eye toward what it would all look like in the Oval Office — something so many of them viewed as an impossibility for so long."

"You can see it from the minute the television news day starts, on the set of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. A few months ago media writers were describing a too-cozy relationship between Mr. Trump and the show’s hosts, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski."


"Yet there was Mr. Scarborough on Wednesday asking the former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael V. Hayden whether there were safeguards in place to ensure that if Mr. Trump “gets angry, he can’t launch a nuclear weapon,” given the perception that he might not be “the most stable guy.”

"Then Mr. Scarborough shared an alarming conversation he said he had with a “foreign policy expert” who had given Mr. Trump a national security briefing. “Three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons,” Mr. Scarborough said, describing one of the questions as “If we have them, why can’t we use them?”

"Speaking with me later, Mr. Scarborough, a Republican, said he had not contemplated sharing the anecdote with the audience until just before he did."

“When that discussion came up, I really didn’t have a choice,” Mr. Scarborough said. “That was something I thought Americans needed to know.”

"Mr. Trump has denied Mr. Scarborough’s account. (He told The New York Times in March he would use nuclear weapons as “an absolutely last step.” But when the MSNBC host Chris Matthews challenged him for raising the possibility he would use them, Mr. Trump asked, “Then why are we making them?”)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/business/balance-fairness-and-a-proudly-provocative-presidential-candidate.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

Why indeed.

"Mr. Scarborough, a frequent critic of liberal media bias, said he was concerned that Mr. Trump was becoming increasingly erratic, and asked rhetorically, “How balanced do you have to be when one side is just irrational?”

"Mr. Scarborough is on the opinion side of the news business. It’s much dodgier for conventional news reporters to treat this year’s political debate as one between “normal” and “abnormal,” as the Vox editor in chief Ezra Klein put it recently."

"In a sense, that’s just what reporters are doing. And it’s unavoidable. Because Mr. Trump is conducting his campaign in ways we’ve not normally seen."

"No living journalist has ever seen a major party nominee put financial conditions on the United States defense of NATO allies, openly fight with the family of a fallen American soldier, or entice Russia to meddle in a United States presidential election by hacking his opponent (a joke, Mr. Trump later said, that the news media failed to get). And while coded appeals to racism or nationalism aren’t new — two words: Southern strategy — overt calls to temporarily bar Muslims from entry to the United States or questioning a federal judge’s impartiality based on his Mexican heritage are new."

"The media reaction to it all has been striking, what The Columbia Journalism Review called “a Murrow moment.” It’s not unusual to see news stories describe him as “erratic” without attribution to an opponent. The “fact checks” of his falsehoods continue to pile up in staggering numbers, far outpacing those of Mrs. Clinton. And, on Sunday, the CNN “Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter called upon journalists and opinion makers to challenge Mr. Trump’s “dangerous” claims that the electoral system is rigged against him. Failure to do so would be unpatriotic, Mr. Stelter said."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/business/balance-fairness-and-a-proudly-provocative-presidential-candidate.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Business%20Day&action=keypress&region=FixedLeft&pgtype=article

Yes. The media should be truthful not balanced. It's a relief to see that many are starting to get this. You often see now where they will correct a lie he tells in real time. Rather than simply being his microphone.

A lot of core Trump supporters certainly view it that way. That will only serve to worsen their already dim view of the news media, which initially failed to recognize the power of their grievances, and therefore failed to recognize the seriousness of Mr. Trump’s candidacy.

This, however, is what being taken seriously looks like. As Ms. Ryan put it to me, Mr. Trump’s candidacy is “extraordinary and precedent-shattering” and “to pretend otherwise is to be disingenuous with readers.”