The election's over

The new target is Bloggers.
There must be too many of pieces like this around for journalistic comfort. A recent editorial in the Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City) is ostensibly about pollsters but it begins with a dig at bloggers, whom it blames collectively for leaking early exit polls, as if bloggers were a monolith like the mainstream media. I get most of my news from blogs, but I didn't read anything about the exit polls, until I tuned in Fox News before the polls closed and saw Brit Hume's panel looking like their dog had just died. They'd all been reading the exit polls and were muttering around without saying exactly what they said. As the evening wore on, however, the returns didn't match the exit polls, and the talk was all "why were the exit polls so wrong?"

A good day for pollsters but a bad one for bloggers? How about that Real Clear Politics website? Well, it's not really a blog, except that it's updated continuously as things develop, like a blog; it contains links to news and commentary, like a blog; and it contains original commentary by the proprietors, like a blog; and it's main thing is polls which it collects and averages. So this blog website had a very good day and is established as a go-to site for future elections, and a convenient place to get a roundup of the commentariat.