Re Byron’s nasty-gram, everyone should acknowledge that we shouldn’t live in a cave and imagine Bush is wildly popular. It’s not strategically smart to utterly ignore polls if they look bad. But there are two media-bias points here. First, the networks all ran for the CBS poll results like Leonard Nimoy was giving autographs at a Trekkie convention. Isn’t it weird that every other network, which pay for their own polls, all jumped on the CBS numbers? It’s not like the poll results are like Olympic judges, with the high mark and the low mark get thrown out. They all jumped on the low number, as if to say: now this is the number we want to be true. I have more on this here.

Second, I always think of the network polls as their own internal measurements of how well their anti-Bush coverage is sinking in. “Everything seems to be piling up and pushing his popularity down,” reported Paula Zahn on CNN. Not quite. It’s the media which seems to be piling up and pushing his popularity down. Can anyone imagine, for just one example, that if Katrina had hit New Orleans in 1999, with the same disastrous force, that the news media would basically be treating the hurricane as a Clinton scandal?