[asinclair]

...resistant to polls...

No kidding. I'm so tired of pollsters that when someone says "I'm taking a poll" I press the "OFF" button on my phone. Reflex. I do not participate in unofficial straw polls any more. I'll participate in the one poll that counts. (I live in Nevada, which may explain the frequency of pollsters calling.)

I'm fed up with the coverage of this "contest" as a horse-race and a parade of cheap shots. Both candidates are short on facts and long on snipe. And reading Free Republic has dropped on my daily priority list because many of the commenters here on political articles are sloganeers, not thoughtful writers. (By the way, Politico is just as bad, just the wind blows in a different direction there.)

The worst of the sniping and selective presentation is in the editorial cartoons. Yes, some of them are funny, but the majority of them represent a particular point of view to the exclusion of everything else. So I'll enjoy the funnies, but discount the message as vacuous and incomplete. The panels about the NFL replacement refs was more balanced, fair, accurate -- and funny -- than the majority of the political panels.

I have yet to see a good, accurate side-by-side comparison of the positions of the two campaigns. Of course, the mainstream media is more interested in reporting things that move papers and magazines and attract eardrums and eyeballs, not providing the electorate good, concise reporting of the unbiased facts. That include Limbaugh, Beck, Drudge, and their ilk, by the way. It's what they don't report that's the problem.

Being accurate and unbiased doesn't sell, apparently. And whose fault is that?

So this independent is not going to be sampled outside of a voting booth.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

I have yet to see a good, accurate side-by-side comparison of the positions of the two campaigns. Of course, the mainstream media is more interested in reporting things that move papers and magazines and attract eardrums and eyeballs, not providing the electorate good, concise reporting of the unbiased facts. That include Limbaugh, Beck, Drudge, and their ilk, by the way. It's what they don't report that's the problem.

Being accurate and unbiased doesn't sell, apparently. And whose fault is that?

My take is that while it is possible and desirable to attempt to be objective, it is not possible to know that you actually are objective. And that attempting objectivity must start with self-examination - a conscientious effort to be open and above-board about one’s own incentives and motives.

But that leads directly to a caveat: if you claim that you are objective, you are rejecting the need to examine your own motives, and you are stating as a fact something which, in the nature of things, it is impossible for you to know. So if I hear you declaring your own objectivity - or, still worse, if I see that you belong to an organization which claims objectivity for you - I have to recognize that you not only are not objective, you are self-deluded or else consciously tendentious. Objectivity which is self-declared is an oxymoron.

It is not far to look to find organizations which claim objectivity for their members; every major newspaper or broadcaster claims objectivity for its reporters and editors, and every wire service or broadcast network claims objectivity for its member newspapers and broadcast stations. This directly leads to conformity masquerading as objectivity. The fractious independence for which newspapers of the founding era and up to the Civil War were noted is no more. Killed, IMHO, by the Associated Press (which started in the middle of the Nineteenth Century).

Since it is not really legitimate to judge someone’s objectivity by their claim of objectivity, it’s necessary to evaluate any commentary on the basis of what we know of the interests and motives of the commenter. Thus a Rush Limbaugh, who doesn’t claim objectivity but is openly conservative, may in reality actually be relatively objective - especially when compared to the pseudo-objectivity of journalism.

From my POV, “liberals” - and “moderates” and “” as well - are simply people whom pseudo-objective journalists give positive labels to. And “conservatives,” “right wingers,” - you name it - are simply people whom the pseudo-objective journalists seek to marginalize. IMHO “progressives” seek to minimize the credit which accrues to people who actually provide goods and services which we-the-people want and need. And to promote themselves in the process. See, “you didn’t build that.” Such people get positive labels from pseudo-objective journalists for the simple reason that journalists are engaged in exactly the same behavior, and they therefore find common ground.