Oct 08 2008
Why the CNN tracking bar is stupid
Did you watch the second presidential debate tonight and happen to watch it on CNN? You may have noticed the bar at the bottom of the screen. They did the same thing in the previous two debates (presidential and vice presidential).
If you missed it, CNN put 25 people (1/3 registered republican, 1/3 registered democrat, 1/3 registered independent) in a room and gave them the ability to rate, in real-time, how the speaker is making them feel at that specific moment.
For example, if Barack Obama is speaking and as a poller, you don’t like what he’s saying, you turn your dial down, registering a negative rating. If, by contrast, you love what he’s saying, you turn your dial up, registering a positive rating.
Those ratings are then aggregated and shown as a line graph in real-time as you’re watching the debate on TV.
Sounds cool, right? As a TV viewer you get to see, in real-time, what the sample group (segmented by gender) is feeling at that exact moment. Cool. So what happens when it’s over? Incredibly, nothing.
Where are the results?
Why can’t they segment the results and tell us how specific topics registered with the specific cross-section of people polled?
Which topics registered most negatively/positively among registered republicans, democrats, and independents?
Soledad O’Brien, CNN reporter and focus group leader, mentions that the data will be crunched by MIT “number crunchers,” but we never saw any of it. If they reported any of the data, I missed it and someone please set me straight.
Sorry, I know this is a rant. I know they never said it was an official opinion poll or that the data really meant anything. It was a focus group. The problem is that they didn’t present it as such on the screen.
For example, if I didn’t tune into CNN before the debate, what would I think of the men/women bar graph at the bottom of the screen? I would have no clue. For all I know, they are polling hundreds of debate watchers. On the left of the line graph it said something like “Ohio independent voters” or “Ohio non-committed” or something like that. Beyond that, it doesn’t give the viewer any clue as to what the heck the lines mean. If I missed the ten minute explanation before the debate, I’m instantly confused. Show me a link to a website that describes what the line graph means!
At the end of the debate, publish the results!
I want to see the data segmented by topic, party, and gender. They clearly had the data, but elected to just use the pretty graph and not give us a true analysis in the end.
I understand it was cool to see. I just want more substance.
Disclaimer: I wrote this post right after the debate. If the results were posted somewhere and I missed them, please let me know.
Disclaimer 2: <sigh>I didn’t mean to say stupid. Now I feel badly. Again, I wrote this after the debate when I was mad there were no real results.</sigh>
I totally agree. Unfortunately, all of CNN’s stats/data are this thin. It drives me crazy!! Early this year the Census Bureau published, “In 2007, 86 percent of all adults 25 and older reported they had completed at least high school and 29 percent at least a bachelor’s degree.” I don’t want to say that the majority of the population has minimal education or that someone needs a bachelor’s to understand to stats, b/c neither of those statements are entirely accurate. However, I hate it that CNN doesn’t share all the details about their stats, like you mentioned in this post. It makes me wonder how many people take the data at face value? How many people are they influencing because they share one aspect of the results? It drives me crazy because it seems like they want to promote ignorance by keeping people in the dark. I went to a speechwriter’s conference a couple of years ago and I’ll never forget this quote, “Numbers will confess to anything.” Leave out one bitty piece of information and the data can represent whatever you want it to. I wonder what lovely stats they’ll use in tonight’s debate?
[...] favorite pre-election (psuedo) statistics tool? You may already know for me it’s the stupid CNN tracker bar from the debates (ugh!). Why? I hate eye candy. Pretty or cool for the sake of being pretty or [...]