Truth is that it’s actually a waste of time and credibility to try to make a news story about minor changes in the Newspoll figures – changes that fall even within the margin of error. Bottom line this week, as it is every week: the Liberals will get hammered, especially under Malcolm Turnbull. Nothing remotely likely will change that.
I counted four stories by Dennis Shanahan about the latest Newspoll in today’s Australian. Way to celebrate the paper’s forty-fifth birthday, I suppose.
When I first discovered FiveThirtyEight.Com (courtesy of Down and Out of Sài Gòn on one of the American election threads here at LP, if I recall correctly), I thought of Nate Silver as America’s Possum. Coincidentally, there’s a profile of Silver published in New York magazine which makes some very similar points about the emergence of a statistician doing psephological wonkery as an avocation into a major source of expertise and information on elections as an article sounding that theme from Monash University Journalism Professor Chris Nash in the new edition of the Pacific Journalism Review.
Just think what elections would be like without Possums and Silvers! If all we had to rely on for psephological goodness was the dead tree media…
Update [by Mark]: Jason Wilson at Gatewatching espies a tipping point in the Australian political blogosphere.
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Newspoll 55-45; The Australian turns 45
Andrew Bolt makes sense!
I counted four stories by Dennis Shanahan about the latest Newspoll in today’s Australian. Way to celebrate the paper’s forty-fifth birthday, I suppose.
More on the Newspoll at Possum and The Poll Bludger.