DRIVING CABLE'S DAY.

From Mike Allen's Playbook:

DRIVING CABLE'S DAY -- “AP presidential poll: Race tightens in final weeks,” By Liz Sidoti: “The presidential race tightened after the final debate, with John McCain gaining among whites and people earning less than $50,000, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll that shows McCain and Barack Obama essentially running even among likely voters in the election homestretch. The poll, which found Obama at 44 percent and McCain at 43 percent, supports what some Republicans and Democrats privately have said in recent days: that the race narrowed after the third debate as GOP-leaning voters drifted home to their party and McCain's "Joe the plumber" analogy struck a chord

I'm fascinated by this. The AP/GFK poll released yesterday was one of 13 national polls released yesterday that covered the time period stretching from 10/16 to 10/22. Among these 13 polls, Obama has an average lead on 6.92 points. Of the 13 polls, the AP/GFK had the third smallest voter sample, and thus one of the largest margins of error. And so what Mike Allen is saying here is that cable news will purposefully misinform its viewers by emphasizing an outlier poll result in order to inject more sensationalism and uncertainty into a race whose fundamental stability is beginning to make for bad TV. And Mike Allen thinks that this preference for misleading sensationalism is such a predictable feature of cable news that you can pretty much assume its existence and predict which data point they will dishonestly decide to elevate into a daylong story. And I think he's probably right! But isn't this, you know, a problem? Just like it would be a problem if the cable networks were touting the 12-point lead obama has in the Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll? As a profession, we seem to have become oddly comfortable with the idea that a vast swath of what the public thinks of as "the news media" spends its days lying to people because misinforming Americans makes for more watchable TV than informing them does.I'm not really certain what you do about this, of course, but surely when Mike Allen can just assume that cable news will spend its day spitting on journalistic ethics, it's time for the news profession to start thinking about reform, or censure, or some way to separate the work of real news organizations from political entertainment outlets.