Charles Pierce: The WSJ/NBC deliberately excluded #2 Warren from poll match-ups [View all]

[pnwmom]

FOR NO GOOD REASON.

Lawrence O'Donnell at MSNBC was the only one who came off well in this debacle, because he refused to report on the poll with Warren not included.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a31001210/elizabeth-warren-nbc-news-poll-left-out/

On Tuesday night, Senator Professor Warren was the victim of one of the the most egregious offenses ever committed by a major news organization. In conjunction with the Wall Street Journal, the fine hand of which I suspect was involved in what follows, NBC News released its latest polling data. The general overall numbers were pretty much as expected, except Bernie Sanders’s lead had grown. Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, and SPW were in a virtual dead-heat for second. National polling in a primary campaign can be dismissed as largely irrelevant, but the railbirds among political journalists make a big deal out of them, so we talk about them like they really mean something. However, it was elsewhere in the polling where the real malignant mischief was done.

The poll also asked respondents for their preferences in head-to-head matches with the president*, and head-to-head matches with each other. (This latter seemed hinky in a multi-player field but, what the hell, For Amusement Purposes Only, as the parlay cards used to say.) Mark Murray, NBC’s political majordomo, tweeted out the results on Wednesday afternoon. I read them, up and down, about four times before I had convinced myself of the astonishing fact that SPW, ranked in a statistical tie for second in NBC’s own national poll, did not even appear in these one-on-one surveys. Joe Biden, who has finished out of the money everywhere he’s run, and who is in the middle of his third consecutive landfill of a presidential campaign, was included. Amy Klobuchar was included. SPW was nowhere to be found.

SNIP

The poll, from NBC and the Wall Street Journal, found Warren was effectively tied for second place nationally, with 14% of the vote. But pollsters excluded her from a series of match-ups between Trump and top candidates. The poll include Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and Mike Bloomberg, who all polled within a point of Warren, and Amy Klobuchar, who trailed significantly behind them. Peter Hart, whose firm conducted the poll, told BuzzFeed News that the poll had “space and time” for just five candidate match-ups.

In other words, they didn’t include SPW because they didn’t want to. In other words, this poll and its subsequent publication make up a staggering act of deliberate journalistic malpractice, and anyone who continues to cite it needs to be demoted to night rewrite for a spell. And it is interesting to note that neither of the two news organizations behind the poll chose to comment on the BuzzFeed story. Sometimes, my business really sucks pondwater. (Lawrence O’Donnell refused to use the poll on his MSNBC show Tuesday night specifically because of SPW’s exclusion. Fair play to him for that.) Of course, SPW has dedicated her entire public career to fighting against the distortions in our lives and our politics by the people for whom the WSJ serves the same function as The Daily Racing Form, So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.