Your So-called Liberal Media at work

It doesn't matter right now. It's not going to affect the election in any material way. But this is the sort of thing that has made me crazy for the past sixteen years:

In a set up to an interview with Senators Jim Webb (D-VA) and Richard Burr (R-NC), MSNBC's painful David Gregory gave an "update" on polling in those two states: [pic omitted] Notice the dates of those polls?

The Virginia poll is two weeks old. According to Pollster.com, there have been five other more recent polls in Virginia since the one Gregory chose to highlight. But, coincidentally or not, the poll he broadcast is the last to show a McCain lead.

The North Carolina poll is a week old. Pollster.com shows there here have been four other polls in North Carolina since then. Three of them show Obama in the lead. One has a tie.

David Gregory should be embarrassed. He should learn about the really great sites with up-to-date polls, like Pollster.com and FiveThirtyEight.com. Those polls Gregory showed aren't "news." Not even close. He's making himself look either out-of-touch or biased by using polls that are so out-dated.

A charitable interpretation is that Gregory was incompetent in picking the polls he did. A less charitable one is that he manipulated the data to support a false premise (the close horse-race one). An even less charitable possibility is that he, like so many others in our center-right media, simply cannot bring themselves to believe that a democrat can be competitive in these red states, and so he discarded the multiple other polls as "not credible."

I should be clear here. I do not think Gregory is in the tank for McCain, not at all. I think he's bought into the bullshit notion of "equivalency" and "balance" that has for so long skewed the media to the right. It's just frustrating.