Rolling the Post

One of the reasons blogs like this one have sprung up over the past few years is the fact that too often liberals find that the media, rather than being liberal or conservative, is clueless and is subject to being rolled by conservatives in an attempt to fool the public.

On Wednesday the Washington Post's Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt got rolled during a Post Q&A. The questioner asked why a "recent Gallup Poll had Obama at 58 percent approval, the lowest 100-Day presidential rating in forty years except for Bill Clinton's 56 percent in 1993."

Hiatt gave a rambling answer about how that Obama is still popular, just not among Republicans. But somehow Hiatt never thought to question if the reader was correct, or to spend a few seconds checking out the claim before validating it.

If Hiatt had bothered to check it out, as reporters are supposed to do, he would found the reader was parrotting the right-wing talking points spun by the Washington Times who wrote that "President Obama's media cheerleaders are hailing how loved he is. But at the 100-day mark of his presidency, Mr. Obama is the second-least-popular president in 40 years" at 56% approval.

One problem, the Gallup Poll says Obama's approval rating is at 65%.

How can that be? Because the Times, and conservatives, are cherry picking data from a poll with different methodology and comparing to past 100 day polls. Using comparable data Obama is fourth among Presidents over the past 50 plus year, just after Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Reagan, but well of Bush I & II.

But why should Hiatt think to challenge the reader? It's not as if Hiatt worked for a place that recently conducted a poll showing for the first time in six years more people think that the country is on the right track than wrong track (ABC News - Washington Post poll). If he was aware of that poll then he would have been aware that percentage of people thinking the country is going in the right direction has gone from 8% in November to 50% now, signifying strong support for the President.

But that's just one indicator. It's also not like Hiatt would have been aware that the previous day the Conference Board reported that a leading indicator, the Consumer Confidence Index, had increased by 50% in the last month, going from 26% to 39%.

No, if the reader claimed Obama had lower approval ratings than other past presidents, it must be so and there was no need to wonder why that conflicted with his own paper's data or other leading data. Anyway people can figure out the truth for themselves. Surely they can find it in a blog somewhere.