Polling firms all have a methodology for making the people they polled match up with how they think the country looks. For instance, if 70% of the people they reach are women, they know that voters are not 70% female, so they give a lower weighting to their results from women, and a higher weighting to their results from men.

That leads us to UnskewedPolls. The crew at UnskewedPolls took a look at all the major polling firms – you know, the ones that kept showing Obama in the lead – and concluded that they were all liberally biased. Those polls had the audacity to assume that there would be lots of Democrats voting and not enough Republicans! When everyone knows that Obama is terribly unpopular and that most Americans are conservative, right? Clearly there will be lots more Republican voters than that! So UnskewedPolls took the poll data and “unskewed” them, adjusting the weightings.

Their results? Romney with 311 electoral votes! Romney wins by 3.5% of the popular vote! Romney will win 9 of the 11 swing states! I will admit that one of the things I was looking forward to on November 7 was UnskewedPolls getting a serious comeuppance – and indeed, UnskewedPolls is now a laughingstock, while Nate Silver and his “liberal bias” make a victory lap.

Here’s the problem, though. On election night, says a senior Romney advisor, the Romney campaign was shocked, astonished, devastated. There’s a reason Romney hadn’t prepared a concession speech: because he was fully confident he was going to win. Why? Because the Romney camp used the same methodology as UnskewedPolls:

They believed the public/media polls were skewed – they thought those polls oversampled Democrats and didn’t reflect Republican enthusiasm. They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney. That was a grave miscalculation, as they would see on election night…

State polls showed Romney winning big among independents. Historically, any candidate polling that well among independents wins. But as it turned out, many of those independents were former Republicans who now self-identify as independents. The state polls weren’t oversampling Democrats and undersampling Republicans – there just weren’t as many Republicans this time because they were calling themselves independents.

Romney’s late-campaign push into Pennsylvania wasn’t a Hail Mary play, it turns out; it was a “stretch goal”, since Romney thought he had the battleground states locked up.

If there’s one thing I hope comes out of the 2012 election, it’s that the conservatives will recognize that the right-wing media bubble they’ve been fostering and living in told them what they wanted to hear, rather than what was actually happening. Plugging your fingers in your ears and declaring that anyone who says something you don’t like is under a liberal bias leads to moments like Tuesday night, when the Fox News talking heads were genuinely shellshocked that Romney didn’t win — even though poll after poll showed that Romney was at best even with Obama, at worst four points behind.

In what should not be a surprise, a survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that while people who watched no news could answer 1.22 questions correctly,

…someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer just 1.04 domestic questions correctly — a figure which is significantly worse than if they had reported watching no media at all. On the other hand, if they listened only to NPR, they would be expected to answer 1.51 questions correctly; viewers of Sunday morning talk shows fare similarly well. And people watching only The Daily Show with Jon Stewart could answer about 1.42 questions correctly.

Media Matters put together this great montage of Fox “News”[sic] anchors explaining how the President doesn’t have the power to lower gas prices, and that the way to insulate ourselves from gas price spikes is to reduce our use of oil.

The clips, of course, are from 2008.

A Farleigh Dickinson poll finds

that Sunday morning news shows are the most informative, while Fox News actually leads people to be less informed than those who consume no news at all…

“The (poll’s) results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all,” said Dan Cassino, a political science professor at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the poll.

Also no surprise:

Those who watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart performed well on the questions. Sixty percent of Daily Show viewers correctly answered that opposition forces in Syria have not yet toppled the government, second only to NPR. Forty-five percent of Fox News viewers answered “no.”

A terrorist plot had its day in court today, as four extremists from an allegedly peaceful religion plotted to murder US officials and talked of blowing up government buildings.

The four were named as Frederick Thomas, Dan Roberts, Ray Adams, and Samuel Crump, all ranging in age from 65 to 73.

Wait a second! Those aren’t Muslim names! The BBC must have gotten it wrong.

In case you’re wondering whether you’ll hear the word “terrorism” used when viewing the Fox “News” coverage, with the usual outrage about why these guys aren’t being waterboarded in Gitmo until they reveal all their plans, Media Matters explains what you can expect:

Charging documents indeed state that accused plotter Frederick Thomas repeatedly cited as an inspiration the novel Absolved, in which underground militia fighters declare war on the federal government over gun control laws and same-sex marriage, leading to a second American revolution. But Fox’s report neglected to mention the allegedly inspirational novel’s author, who is no stranger to Fox viewers.

Indeed, the author, Mike Vanderboegh, has been mainstreamed by the network, which has repeatedly featured him as an expert on the ATF’s failed Operation Fast and Furious.

The White House had a party for the President’s 50th birthday.

How did Fox Nation describe it?
“Obama’s Hip-Hop BBQ Didn’t Create Jobs”.

SERIOUSLY.

Read on.

Let’s compare headlines from around the Web:

* New York Times – The Road to Gay Marriage in New York

* Wall Street Journal – Gay Marriage Voted In

* Washington Post – New York Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage

And who, you might be wondering, would be so irresponsible as to portray this in a pessimistic, “glass half full” light? You guessed it:

* Fox “News” – Same-Sex Marriage Advocates Face Uphill Climb in Building on N.Y. Vote

The news is all a-flutter today with the Pope’s recent statements:

“Health justice should be among the priorities of governments and international institutions,” he added.

The pope said that establishing this goal requires “a true distributive justice that guarantees to all, on the basis of objective needs, adequate care,” and he said “the social doctrine of the Church has always evidenced the importance of distributive justice and of social justice in the different sectors of human relations.”

Oh, also:

Benedict says condom use is acceptable “in certain cases”.

As John Fugelsang pointed out, can you guess which one got all the press?

Now, according to Glenn Beck, whenever anyone says “social justice” they’re a Communist and/or Nazi:

I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!

Communists are on the left, and the Nazis are on the right. That’s what people say. But they both subscribe to one philosophy, and they flew one banner. . . . But on each banner, read the words, here in America: ‘social justice.’ They talked about economic justice, rights of the workers, redistribution of wealth, and surprisingly, democracy.

You heard it, Catholics. Glenn Beck says you should leave your church, because apparently Pope Benedict is a Marxist. (Now, Nazi, that’s a little more complicated.)

A dangerous, foreign-born millionaire stirring up unrest in the country and accusing opponents of voter fraud? Jon Stewart present this truly epic takedown of Glenn Beck.

I am amazed at Stewart’s ability to keep a straight face through Part 2.

Many of America’s top brands rate much higher among one political party or the other, according to an analysis of YouGov’s BrandIndex survey results.

When you look at the results, you’ll note that the top brand for Democrats is Google, and the top brand for Republicans is Fox News.

So it seems that Democrats prefer a brand that lets them find unfiltered information on just about any subject, while Republicans prefer a brand that provides information that’s been tailored to fit their beliefs.

Several years ago, the webcomic Dinosaur Comics published this strip, suggesting a story about a world where a machine can tell you how you’re going to die. Inspired by this premise, a bunch of authors got together to put out a collection of short stories using this theme. They couldn’t find a publisher, so they published it themselves, and by drumming up enough support among their fans, they got the book to hit the top of the Amazon charts on the day it came out.

As it turns out, Glenn Beck’s latest book was released on the same day, and was therefore denied the #1 slot. Beck was gracious about it, praising the entrepreneurial, bootstrapping spirit of the publishers as an example of what makes American initiative great, and said he admired their “little dog against the big guys” story.

Ha, ha! Just kidding. As with everything else, he saw in it a dangerous left-wing conspiracy:

“…Our books are ALWAYS #1. And I find it REALLY fascinating, FASCINATING, that if you go to Amazon.com, Broke is number THREE… And then, the #1 book—TODAY at least—is Machine of Death. And it’s collected stories about, you know, people who know how they’re gonna die. Haowww! … This is the left, I think, speaking. This is the left. You want to talk about where we’re headed? We’re headed towards a culture of death. A culture that, um, celebrates the things that have destroyed us.”
- The Glenn Beck Radio Program, October 27, 2010

Tom the Dancing Bug captures the difference between the real Tea Party and its modern-day imitators.

I’m not even kidding. By their own logic, when you watch Fox and Friends or Glenn Beck, you are funding terror. I am completely serious.

The Daily Show analyzes the Fox “News” coverage of the Islamic cultural center and how it’s funded by the Kingdom Foundation, a Saudi group run by a Wahhabist prince who funds radical madrasahs. What Fox fails to mention: said prince is the largest shareholder of Fox News outside of the Murdoch family.

When you watch Fox, they earn advertiser revenue. When they earn revenue, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal earns money. When he earns money, he funds madrasahs that Fox says are part of a terror network. Follow the money trail. Fox wants you to.

See what I mean?

(At least until they close this little security loophole)

Fox needs to learn never to tangle with a comedian.
Because the comedian always gets the last laugh.

Conservative columnist David Frum has nothing but harsh words for his own party right now:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Bill O’Reilly asked folks to grade Obama on his first year in office. The results might surprise you.

You will be shocked, shocked to learn that an independent report by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, now of the law firm Proskauer Rose, has found that

While some of the advice and counsel given by ACORN employees and volunteers was clearly inappropriate and unprofessional, we did not find a pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff; in fact, there is no evidence that action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers.

Furthermore, it appears that the videos may not exactly be the most perfect representations of ACORN, either.

The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms. Giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

As one comment on MetaFilter put it: “Can we expect the entire staff of Fox News to resign, like Dan Rather did?”

In this week’s issue of Newsweek, columnist Jacob Weisberg pulls no punches in his article “The O’Garbage Factor”. The article’s subtitle, in fact, is “Fox News isn’t just bad. It’s un-American.”

What’s most distinctive about the American press is not its freedom but its century-old tradition of independence—that it serves the public interest rather than those of parties, persuasions, or pressure groups. Media independence is a 20th-century innovation that has never fully taken root in many other countries that do have a free press. The Australian-British-continental model of politicized media that Murdoch has applied at Fox is un-American, so much so that he has little choice but go on denying what he’s doing as he does it. For Murdoch, Ailes, and company, “fair and balanced” is a necessary lie. To admit that their coverage is slanted by design would violate the American understanding of the media’s role in democracy and our idea of what constitutes fair play. But it’s a demonstrable deceit that no longer deserves equal time.

He ends with a call to action:

By appearing on Fox, reporters validate its propaganda values and help to undermine the role of legitimate news organizations. Respectable journalists—I’m talking to you, Mara Liasson—should stop appearing on its programs. A boycott would make Ailes too happy, so let’s try just ignoring Fox, shall we? And no, I don’t want to come on The O’Reilly Factor to discuss it.

When the Teabaggers marched on Washington, the DC authorities estimated the crowd size at around 80,000. Needless to say, Fox “News”[sic] gave that march extensive endorsementcoverage.

Naturally, when another political march gathered that same number of protesters, one would expect a respectable news organization to give it an equal amount of coverage.

…they didn’t even send a reporter or camera crew.

See Jon Stewart’s take on it.