They just don`t get it...CNBC took off the tv-debate-online-poll and their "Managing Editor" seems to be honest (in dubio pro reo) with this "open letter" but seems unable to grasp what is really happening outside his MSM-box...(and does not know what "hacking" actually means...).
An Open Letter to the Ron Paul Faithful
Editor's Note:Dear folks,
You guys are good. Real good. You are truly a force on World Wide Web and I tip my hat to you.
That's based on my first hand experience of your work regarding our CNBC Republican candidate debate. After the debate, we put up a poll on our Web site asking who readers thought won the debate. You guys flooded it.
Now these Internet polls are admittedly unscientific and subject to hacking. In the end, they are really just a way to engage the reader and take a quick temperature reading of your audience. Nothing more and nothing less. The cyber equivalent of asking the room for a show of hands on a certain question.
So there was our after-debate poll. The numbers grew ... 7,000-plus votes after a couple of hours ... and Ron Paul was at 75%.
Now Paul is a fine gentleman with some substantial backing and, by the way, was a dynamic presence throughout the debate , but I haven't seen him pull those kind of numbers in any "legit" poll. Our poll was either hacked or the target of a campaign. So we took the poll down.
The next day, our email basket was flooded with Ron Paul support messages. And the computer logs showed the poll had been hit with traffic from Ron Paul chat sites. I learned other Internet polls that night had been hit in similar fashion. Congratulations. You folks are obviously well-organized and feel strongly about your candidate and I can't help but admire that.
But you also ruined the purpose of the poll. It was no longer an honest "show of hands" -- it suddenly was a platform for beating the Ron Paul drum. That certainly wasn't our intention and certainly doesn't serve our readers ... at least those who aren't already in the Ron Paul camp.
Some of you Ron Paul fans take issue with my decision to take the poll down. Fine. When a well-organized and committed "few" can throw the results of a system meant to reflect the sentiments of "the many," I get a little worried. I'd take it down again.
Sincerely, Allen Wastler
Managing Editor,
CNBC.com
6 comments:
Let me try to understand this: even though no hacking at all was shown -- or even claimed, except in the figurative sense of "too many active Ron Paul supporters watching television" -- the poll was hidden away from sight because it was not "an honest show of hands" but a "beating of drums" instead?!
Interesting. Do they have some sort of "scientific" device to measure the noise of keyboard clicks, or the pressure exerted on the keys, or something along those lines?
Or maybe the message to the audience is simply "this is our show of hands, not yours..."
One more comment.
The picture you use is great, and very nice for places where gun ownership stays lawful because people refuse to be disarmed. But the message may be misunderstood, especially in totalitarian societies in the making as we now have in many countries of the European Union.
We need more, not less, lawful guns in the hands of free people. And we need a true 1776-style Bill of Rights for all countries of the Union, instead of "constitutional treaties" imposed without a vote on people still mentally benumbed by the state-sponsored murderous violence of the 20th century.
Why not indeed use the Ron Paul movement to start a "Real Human Rights" movement in Europe, one that will seek legal guarantees that will begin with the words "Legislative bodies shall make no law respecting..." rather than the idiotic jungle of rights, semi-rights and exceptions to the rights that so delight our lawmakers?
William Tell would make a better European icon than any flower throwers...
Said I: "And we need a true 1776-style Bill of Rights"
Well, make that 1791-style and 1776 spirit. You get the idea.
Hi Pedro,
to your second comment:
I did not think of the "Gun ownership" discussion. I like the picture, because it highlights the revolutionary mindset of the Ron Paul Revolution AND its peacefullness. NON aggression, only self-defense.
Cheerio
Fabio
Fabio, I agree with "NON aggression, only self-defense," but the right to flower onwership is no great self-defense. Recent laws in my country make it impossible to lawfully own guns any more without the "strictest justification," such as -- you guessed it -- holding or having held political office. It was difficult before, it's practically impossible now, even for small calibres, .22 and such.
Portuguese politicians who shamed this country by actively preparing the criminal aggression against Irak walk free in Brussels, and even hold high office in the EU, well-protected at my (and your) tax-payer expense, while ordinary Portuguese citizens are "preventively" thrown in jail, regardless of any actual violence, for the crime of owning guns of any kind, or knives, or knuckle dusters, or even -- get ready for this -- reading material such as Orwell's "racially discriminatory" Animal Farm (yes, they actually showed a confiscated copy on national television, among other instances of "dangerous extreme-right literature that incites to racism," after a dawn raid on some military stuff store with right wing connections, which would be a laughing matter if it didn't show you the intellectual level of our guardian angels intent on protecting law-abiding citizens from their own evil guns & books).
We should realize this is the EU, not the US. We have a long way to go.
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