A Kansas sports page editor is inviting a visit from the media neutrality goons:

The Associated Press is the largest news-gathering agency in the world. In this country, it hasn’t had any real competition since United Press International went belly-up about a quarter-center ago. The AP’s mantra, like all media, is to report the news.

At the same time, however, the AP manufactures news. That’s what a poll is. Manufactured news. Polls are released Mondays or Tuesdays because those are the traditionally slow news days, and the polls fills air space on radio and TV and columns in newspapers.

Basically an AP poll is a bunch of media-types—in this case sports writers and sportscasters—who band together to produce news that isn’t really news in order to sell more newspapers and lure more listeners and viewers. There’s nothing wrong with that in a business sense, but more and more, newspapers, in particular, are beginning to sense they’re sending the wrong message.

The media engaging in agenda setting and making up news? Never!

As Steven Taylor at PoliBlog notes, the Associated Press has decided to stop allowing the Bowl Championship Series from using its poll to determine the national title matchup. Ivan Maisel at ESPN.com has additional details that shed some light on the AP’s decision:

By pulling out of the formula, the AP has come full circle. In 1998, a sufficient number of AP members didn’t want their college football writers to be responsible for voting teams into the national championship game that the Division I-A commissioners developed the Bowl Championship Series formula to determine the standings used to pick teams for the BCS games.

AP members, worried about making the news instead of reporting it, felt better that their poll was only indirectly responsible for which teams received the eight-figure payout (this season: $14.4 million). ...

An AP voter in Alabama, Paul Gattis of the Huntsville Times, was chastised for voting Auburn No. 3 by the editor of his paper—in print. Three AP voters in Texas drew attention when they moved Texas ahead of California in the final poll, helping the Longhorns qualify for a BCS berth in the Rose Bowl instead of the Golden Bears.

This AP report gives the AP spin on the decision:

“By stating that the AP poll is one of the three components used by BCS to establish its rankings, BCS conveys the impression that AP condones or otherwise participates in the BCS system,” the letter [from the AP to the BCS] said. “Furthermore, to the extent that the public does not fully understand the relationship between BCS and AP, any animosity toward BCS may get transferred to AP. And to the extent that the public has equated or comes to equate the AP poll with the BCS rankings, the independent reputation of the AP poll is lost.”

On the other hand, the weak-mindedness that gave Tom Osborne and Nebraska a split national title from the coaches a few years back seems to have spread to the writers in the person of Neal McCready of the Mobile Register (þ: Big XII Fanblog), too:

I’m used to [my ballot] being publicized and scrutinized. In the past week, after the Austin American-Statesman published every ballot, I received hundreds of e-mails from irate Texas fans upset that I had the Longhorns No. 9 on my last week’s ballot. When they say “Don’t mess with Texas,” they mean it. Most of the e-mails received from the Texas faithful were profanity-laced and less than a stellar reflection on a university and its fan base. For the record, I’m not gay or Communist. I don’t live in a trailer and I still have all my teeth. Those that were diplomatic presented a strong case and after studying the numbers, I agree. I had Texas too low. I fixed it today, moving the Longhorns to No. 5. Please leave me alone now; you’re scaring my wife.

McCready previously had Texas (whose sole loss was to undefeated Oklahoma) ranked behind Louisville, whose only claim to fame was a close loss to 8–3 Miami in an otherwise weak schedule. Mack Brown lobbying or no Mack Brown lobbying, McCready clearly wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing.

Now, if only the Associated Press would go one step further and acknowledge that the act of producing a poll in and of itself undermines the independence of the AP from the sport it is covering, I might be able to respect this decision. But the AP’s choice to distance itself from a controversial system without also taking stock of the reality that the AP’s football and basketball polls are key determinants of the attention given to, and thus the profitability of, all college “revenue” sports—not just the BCS championship game, but also regular-season matchups and, via the NCAA selection committees, the men’s and women’s basketball tournaments—smacks of hypocrisy.

Ivan Maisel has more today on what the BCS does next in the wake of the AP’s decision.

This is my entry in today’s OTB Traffic Jam.

Blatant fabrications by their leading media outlets might be part of the explanation. (þ: OxBlog)

The New York Times endorses John Kerry Anybody But Bush. I think Michele’s reaction pretty much mirrors my own:

Even our nation’s vaunted media can’t come up with enough cogent reasons to vote for Kerry other than he’s not George Bush.

In general, the calculus of strategic voting dictates that people should vote so as to minimize the chances of their least preferred (but “electable”) candidate taking office. From that perspective, at least, the Times’ position makes sense.

Meanwhile, The Belgravia Dispatch advances an alternative perspective (þ: Andrew Sullivan).

My colleague Bob McElvaine, a history prof, has a column in today’s Clarion-Ledger that rests on this rather incomplete definition:

The word conservative means keeping things as they are.

I’m debating between writing a 500-word rebuttal (tying it in with the “You are not X, say Y” theme) or just fisking the mercy out of the piece, though I have to say anyone who’s holding up Charley Reese as an exemplar of mainstream conservative thought in America probably deserves the latter.

Jayson Javitz finds shocking evidence of opinion polls themselves being biased (þ: Viking Pundit). I’ll leave it to Signifying Nothing’s capable readership to identify the problems with this analysis. Free hint: Javitz has “six more examples” that didn’t fit in the limited space in the margin, or something.

Here’s one for the “credit where credit is due” department: New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney won’t be partaking of Spin Alley after the debate tomorrow night, a move applauded by Ryan Pitts of The Dead Parrot Society and Jay Rosen. I agree with both; in fact, I’d almost take it a step further. Ryan writes:

A debate like this is supposed to be about the candidates persuading the voters, each of whom needs to individually assess whose policies and attitudes they’d like to see for the next four years.

Ryan emphasizes the word voters, but I almost think the emphasis should be on the phrase individually assess. Spin, “news analysis,” and the like tend to get in the way of that process, rather than informing it. So my advice to voters would be to watch the debate, and then switch off your TV and not read the reports and op-eds about it the next few days. And, if you can’t spare the time, then reading the reports and op-eds (and blog posts!) is worthless anyway—the entire point of the debate process is to give unfiltered insights into the candidates, and putting an interlocutor between yourself and the candidates will distort the image.

In fairness to Ryan, he’s speaking from the journalist’s perspective—but choosing not to be spun is something the voter can do just as easily. Switching off Matthews or Hannity or Crossfire is just as important for the voter as Nagourney avoiding “spin alley” is for the reporter.

Howard Kurtz reports that CBS is preparing to issue a statement that may (or may not) concede the documents are forgeries and may (or may not) apologize to the viewing public, the president, and/or Viacom shareholders for either (a) failing to properly vet the documents or (b) spending ten days stonewalling while all confidence the memos were real evaporated.

Meanwhile, Daniel Weiner advances a hypothesis about Memogate’s origins (þ Baseball Crank) while Sean Hackbarth wonders why nobody’s asking questions about USA Today’s role in the affair.

The interesting thing about Mississippi State’s Saturday loss to division I-AA Maine isn’t that it happened—it’s that I had to learn about it from the Clarion-Ledger. Surely ESPN, only two weeks out from its hagiographic profile of “history-making” Bulldogs coach Sylvester Croom, just was too busy during “College Gameday Final” to mention the upset and the Bulldogs’ fall below .500; after all, there were critical highlights to be shown from Florida Atlantic’s win over Middle Tennessee State.

The Washington Post reports that the Bush guard memos were faxed to CBS News from a Kinko’s location in Abilene, Texas, which just happens to be down the road from Bill Burkett’s home.

On the other hand, it’s possible that CBS producer Marla Mary Mapes (or some other person working on the story) faxed the documents to New York herself while in Abilene pursuing the story, and Burkett was uninvolved. So it’s hardly a smoking gun as to the source of the documents.

Also, the WaPo account quotes, on its jump page, a comment (attributed to Bill Burkett, although there’s no way to authenticate that it is genuine) from this comment thread at Steve Verdon’s weblog, Deinonychus antirrhopus. Interesting… (þ OTB)

Update: Via Jim Glass in comments at Tom Maguire’s place, WaPo writer Howie Kurtz has part of an interview with Rather:

"If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I'd like to break that story," Rather said in an interview last night. "Any time I'm wrong, I want to be right out front and say, 'Folks, this is what went wrong and how it went wrong.' "

Glass says “It's a little late for that, Dan.” Six days and counting, I think.

“60 Minutes II” doesn’t air in Jackson until 1:35 a.m. overnight (in its place was some sort of TV movie). What does my TiVo program guide say is on the show?

A hoax some consider responsible for helping launch the war in Iraq; actors Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker talk about their life and marriage.

Signifying Nothing has obtained a copy of the “hoax” originally scheduled to be presented before Rathergate started:

It’s all so obvious now.

Update: Here’s a genuine image from the CBS website that apparently comes from the “picture worth a thousand words” department:

Of course, that’s Dan’s boot on the shovel.

As anticipated, CBS’s new defense is that the sentiments expressed in the memos are real, even if the documents themselves are forgeries.

In other words, the memos were real before they were fake.

Plus, I think CBS and Dan Rather might be upset that George W. Bush outsourced their camels.

Now it all makes sense:

I’ll bet that Dan Rather didn’t get to sleep with Jennifer Garner.

Life is rough like that sometimes…

You can tell that things are going badly for the Democrats when the New York Times says the silver lining is that the forged memos are somehow “accurate” despite being, by any objective or sane standard, complete fabrications. I hate to break it to the Times, but this isn’t the Critical Studies department; this is the real world, where we have these neat concepts like “empiricism,” “evidence,” and “temporal order,” not to mention “Word didn’t exist in 1972.”

Such concepts do not appear to hold sway with anti-Bush smearmeister Bill Burkett (a Kerry and DNC fundraiser, not that the Times bothers to mention that in its article) or his attorney, mind you:

Asked what role Mr. Burkett had in raising questions about Mr. Bush’s military service, Mr. Van Os said: “If, hypothetically, Bill Burkett or anyone else, any other individual, had prepared or had typed on a word processor as some of the journalists are presuming, without much evidence, if someone in the year 2004 had prepared on a word processor replicas of documents that they believed had existed in 1972 or 1973 – which Bill Burkett has absolutely not done’’ – then, he continued, “what difference would it make?”

That’s right, kids, it’s acceptable to prepare forgeries of documents you think might have existed in the past, or perhaps even ought to have existed, like that B.A. summa cum laude from Stanford I “deserve” even though they rejected my application 11 years ago, all in the name of greater truth.

Update: Jane Galt has more on this theme:

So if I honestly believe that Bill Clinton had Vince Foster killed, and gave written orders to someone to do so, it's okay if I go ahead and type up a couple of memos to that effect and hand them to the press… and okay if the press runs with them.

The Ra^ther Doctrine spreads . . . and my job just keeps getting easier. By next week, we're going to give up printing news entirely, and give our pages over to Tom Clancy.

Colby Cosh nominates a post by Evan Kirchhoff, no Bush fan, as “Best Thing Written On The Subject” of Ra^therGate. I tend to agree; go read the whole thing, as it’s absolutely merciless throughout. Meanwhile, Susanna Cornett dismisses the idea of Republican dirty tricks, apparently the “out” CBS is going to use for this scandal, as being rather (pardon the pun) lame:

As for the Republicans engineering it… please! Doesn’t CBS realize how thoroughly pathetic and childish that makes them sound? First, it’s very clear that the documents wouldn’t pass serious scrutiny at any time, so even if the Republicans did engineer it, I don’t think even they would have assumed CBS would actually take them seriously! They would have credited CBS with more intelligence, which would have obviously been a flagrant error. Second, if the Republicans were to have engineered this, they would have done a much better job of it. Finally, and actually most importantly, despite the efforts of the MSM to convey the opposite impression, I don’t think the Republicans play that dirty (at least in that arena).

Evan Kirchhoff also has some free advice for his fellow Democrats:

I’ll let you in on a secret: until the recent memo fiesta, I was 100% certain that Bush was AWOL in some sense from something at some point in Texas, since I vaguely remember this going around once or twice before (insert typical rumor about alternative service with Captain J. Daniels, if you know what I mean). Thanks to the CBS/DNC revisitation of the issue, I have boringly learned that there was some kind of flex-time system that operated with an annual “points” scale, and apparently (as I understand this) if you look at Bush’s attendance points, they line up adequately. So now I’m apathetic about AWOL at both the regular and the meta-level.

Currently there are about 7 weeks remaining until the election. If you like, you can spend another two or three of them trying to reverse this conclusion, and if you dig hard enough you might discover that Bill Gates has a time machine he hasn’t previously disclosed to shareholders. But I really think you ought to consider the pure opportunity cost of that project, because with the month nearly half over, it’s starting to look like the entire campaign plan for September consisted of a handful of pseudo-kerned .doc files and Kitty Kelley’s Bush the Coke-Huffing Monkey.

While they’re at it, the DNC might also want to look into finding some campaign workers who actually know what John Kerry stands for. Now, granted, that’s perhaps difficult given Kerry’s own Heisenbergian tendencies, but at least some minor effort on that front would be nice.

I could have sworn I linked Michael Totten last night. Grr… Michael Munger has thoughts in a similar vein today, although I think the more likely explanation (here comes Occam again) is that some deranged, historically clueless anti-Bush person produced the documents—and they’d have gone nowhere if 60 Minutes had done anything approaching due diligence. To believe that anyone planted the documents to discredit the AWOL charges (something that I find nearly impossible to believe could be done, given the other uncertainties in Bush’s records during the era anyway) requires the following assumptions on the part of the forger:

• The person who gave the documents to CBS could never be traced back to the forger (i.e. Bush operatives).
• Someone (CBS) would believe the documents were genuine at first glance, despite all the anachronistic features of the documents.
• CBS would not consult any experts in document authenticity, or even if they did, the experts would be too stupid (or too in hock to CBS) to figure out the documents were anachronistic.
• Other people, with fewer resources than CBS, would figure out the documents were fake.

The first three steps require some sort of Jedi mind control on the part of (presumably) Karl Rove, which is a completely idiotic belief on the basis of Lawrence’s Rule (if nothing else).

Anyway, I think the truth about Bush’s National Guard assignment—and the truth about a lot of things that go on in elite politics and in the South—is embodied in this statement by Virginia Postrel:

I also think that Bush got special treatment, probably without anyone having to ask for it. Given his family's connections and the way Texas operates like a small town, people would have looked out for him.

I made a similar point about Clinton during all of his scandals: he didn’t “suborn perjury” from his supporters—they’d have lied for him without his asking, or his (or anyone else’s) needing to ask. There are limits; this sort of thing wouldn’t happen if you killed someone in cold blood, for example,* but it’s a cornerstone of small-town dynamics that many fail to appreciate.

Dean Esmay is right; anyone speculating in public over the identity of the “memo forger” without evidence is (a) an idiot and more importantly (b) doing the exact same crap CBS pulled in the first place—making charges based on stuff that could just be made up. Sheesh. (þ OTB)

Dean Esmay wants to know if John Kerry has sat down for an interview with a journalist (Jon Stewart doesn’t count) since August 8th. I’m sure he’d appreciate any leads.

I’m not sure that represents “ducking the press” so much as a recognition of the increasingly marginal role that political journalists have in campaigns; why sit down with Russert or Brokaw if you can talk without a filter on the stump (receiving national coverage) and let surrogates handle the spin and the bad PR?

You know, I don’t care to hear about France’s sex life, thank you very much, although I do think the “long pounding” was suffered by the other 49 states, not to mention the Iraqis, rather severely as well.

I enjoyed the bloggers’ panel. Andrew Sullivan was rightfully castigated for his absence, but the remainder of the panel managed admirably in his stead. Ana Marie Cox did ably incorporate repeated sexual references into her comments, but somehow managed to omit references to butt sex, which I suppose was admirable self-restraint on her part.

On a more personal note, I enjoyed meeting (in person) panelists Henry Farrell (who, as it turns out, really sounds Irish in person—try reading his posts sometime with an Irish accent in your head for some amusement) and Laura McKenna, as well as audience members Russell Arben Fox and Stephen Karlson.

One surreal note: an audience member asked Ana Marie about the importance of fact-checking and the blogger’s responsibility for following up on their mistakes as they are more widely disseminated; unfortunately, it appears at this point that the mass media do no better—and perhaps worse—than bloggers in this regard (þ InstaPundit).

Update: Steve the Llama Butcher has a hysterical rundown of the proceedings, wherein the ghost of Woodrow Wilson, esteemed racist bigot and past president of the APSA, makes an extended appearance, although I didn't notice him or INDC Bill in the room (þ PoliBlog and Rusty Shackleford).

Alex Knapp ponders the assumptions underlying Dahlia Lithwick’s op-ed in Thursday’s New York Times calling on Democrats to act like George W. Bush is an adult—not so much because Bush isn’t an imbecile, but because such talk alienates swing voters. Alex writes:

Of course, swing voters (like myself) probably don’t take kindly to discussions about how best to manipulate them (I know I don’t).

With that in mind, there seem to be two unspoken assumptions in this article.

1. That most Kerry supporters really do see Bush as an idiotic, bumbling child.
2. That swing voters don’t read New York Times op-eds—Kerry supporters do.

Alex doesn’t think either of these assumptions are necessarily true. Certainly statement 1 need not be true; notably, even a small minority of Kerry supporters could damage his cause. For example, one suspects most Kerry supporters aren’t sending their hard-earned cash to prop up 527s like ACT and MoveOn.org, instead free-riding on George Soros’ pocketbook.

But I think statement 2 is true; swing voters, by and large, don’t read the Times. Most politically-aware people (essentially, the Times’ audience) are partisans of varying degrees of strength; politically sophisticated fence-sitters like Alex Knapp and Dan Drezner are relative exceptions.* To the extent the Times influences mass opinion, it does so as an elite signaling mechanism for writers at the newspapers and wire services that swing voters do read. If the Times chooses to bury the Swift Vets as partisan hacks instead of leading with the fact the group has already caught Kerry in a lie about his presence in Cambodia, it gives the “all-clear” signal for the Commercial Appeal or Clarion-Ledger to do the same. Thus, if Lithwick (and, by extension, the Times) can influence some Kerry supporters to alter their rhetoric, their “team” will probably come out ahead, even if a few fence-sitters have their noses tweaked in the process.

Riddle me this, Batman:

I think it’s a safe bet that somebody is wrong.

Steve Verdon and I managed to scoop Matt Drudge on this working paper by Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo that attempts to quantify the bias of media outlets using the ADA scale. Where’s my gold star?

Meanwhile, James Joyner reacts to the paper itself. I agree that the method of using think-tank citations isn’t ideal, but I can’t come up with a better one offhand that allows you to put members of Congress and media outlets in the same measurement scale without a lot of a priori assumptions. (There are some other critiques at the Dead Parrot Society.)

Update: As Brock points out, Alex Tabarrok scooped us all. Story of my life.

Steve Verdon links a working paper (an updated version of which will be presented at APSA in September) by political scientists Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo that attempts to quantify the partisan leanings of various media outlets on the basis of their reliance on think tanks for “neutral” information in straight-news stories. Estimated ADA scores for the think tanks are derived from their citations by politicians in the Congressional Record, which are then used to estimate ADA scores for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Drudge Report, Fox News’ Special Report, and the three broadcast network evening newscasts.

I’ve only skimmed the paper so far, but this seems like a fairly sound approach to the problem. As for the results… well, unless your name is Eric Alterman, I doubt you’ll be very surprised.

Needless to say, Mr. Neimeyer’s Wednesday column, which referred to the recently deceased Ronald Reagan as “the anti-Christ,” attracted a rather colorful exchange on the Letters page of the Daily Mississippian.

Thursday:

• Sgt. Chris Hankins.
• Prof. William F. Shugart II (yes, that William F. Shugart II).

Friday:

• Monty Horne.
• Steve Phillips.
• Kenneth Jones (who somehow manages to work in a reference to Matthew Shepard, thereby invoking what has to be the 21st century corollary to Godwin’s Law).
• Prof. David Sansing.

For what it’s worth, I was never a huge Reagan fan—I was more of a Thatcherite in my youth, albeit perhaps a bit more of a “wet” Tory than she was. But in a world with Kim Jong-Il, Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, and the entire leadership of the Chinese Communist Party still around, I think one can find much better candidates for the title “anti-Christ.”

I also think Dr. Shugart might have more properly addressed his remarks to Mr. Neimeyer for having written such ignorant drivel, rather than complaining that the paper failed to exercise proper editorial judgment—although the idea expressed by Mr. Jones that Dr. Shugart’s rather brief letter constitutes a “chill” on free speech only serves to highlight the widespread misconception among undergraduates that the right to hold an opinion somehow includes the non-existent “right” to have that opinion go unchallenged if articulated in public, no matter how ill-informed or poorly-argued it is.