Why is MSNBC lying?

As we all know, MSNBC hosted the first Republican debate of the '08 cycle at the Reagan presidential library Thursday night. They also set up a poll at their website to rate the candidates.
They are now interpreting their results to tell us that Romney "won".

But according to the results, he didn't. Why are they intentionally mis-representing their own results?

Exhibit A: The polling results before the debate:

As you can see, even though this poll is unscientific, it does mimic the popular opinion going into the debate. Giuliani leading, McCain second, and Romney third. The rest of the candidates are lost in the background noise. This indicates that the polling is reasonably indicative of the MSNBC viewers.

Exhibit B: The polling results after the debate

Very clearly (with 77,000 respondents thus far) Mitt Romney did very well, but he came in a distant second to Ron Paul. Furthermore...

Exhibit C: The viewers rate the six attributes that determine the victor

Again, Romney did pretty well, but not nearly as well as Paul.

So naturally, if MSNBC is going to point to these results to declare a winner, they're going to point to Paul, right?

Wrong.

In fact, if you troll through the MSNBC debates section, there is no mention whatsoever of Ron Paul's apparent victory at the debate. There's no mention of Ron Paul whatsoever!
The respondents are clearly perturbed about this fact on their message board.

Throughout their televised "analysis" yesterday (yeah, I watched), they mentioned Ron Paul 3 times by my count, and only admitted that he actually won according to their poll once. Not incidentally, they also chose that moment to state that their polling was unscientific. In addition, the few times they did mention him, they framed it as
#1) He did "pretty well"
and
#2) "He can't win".

So all this begs the question: If their polling indicates that Paul actually won the debate, why can't they just cover the news as it is? Very likely, he can't win, but why crown a false victor in their coverage? Why not simply report the results as they are; cover the story as it appears?

It's very evident that MSNBC doesn't want to give Ron Paul any press. Why not? They know that the two things that will kill a campaign are

• the collective belief that a candidate "can't win"
• lack of recognition

They are clearly attempting to use their influence to alter the results of the Republican primary process.

Why? I mean, if the Republicans happen to nominate a candidate who "can't win", isn't that good news for Dems? This also raises more questions: How are they interfering in the Democratic primary process through their intentionally skewed and selective coverage? What's in it for them?

And most importantly: Why are we allowing them to get away with it?

Published by: Crimes and corruption

Rom Pauls WIns

Ron Paul Wins MSNBC Poll -- Following the first Republican debate, Rep. Ron Paul has won MSNBC's viewer poll. With 32%, Dr Paul beat Mitt Romney by two percentage points. And he had the lowest negative rating of any of the candidates. (Via Thysdrus, Iosue, and others.) A friend of mine recently went to one of Dr Paul's speaking engagement and came away saying, "Wow, Ron Paul rocks." Told you so.

Here's what he says about the Iraq war and our military interventions in general.

Published by:

Dappled THings