Stu Blog

When you have the ratings of MSNBC’s Ed Shultz, how do you spin them as positive to your audience?

The first requirement of Special Ed Math is to make sure that your listeners/viewers are not smart.  This trick won’t work on anyone who is the least bit aware, inquisitive, or intelligent.

Once you’ve cleared that hurdle, as Ed easily does every day, you can implement your Ed Math to trick them into thinking you are successful.  First, listen to the techniques in action, then we can discuss.

Ed Math

Ignoring than the absurd “gonna kick Fox’s ass” nonsense, this is a great window into how people like Schultz operate.

Schultz claims “in the month of August” to have beaten CNN by 1,200,000 in the 25-54 demographic.  Anyone who knows anything about cable news ratings would immediately say “how can you beat a show by 1,200,000 people when you only get 176,000 viewers every night?”

Luckily for Ed, most regular people don’t follow cable news ratings, so they don’t know that.  His audience just trusts that he’s telling the truth.  So, how does Ed get to this mysterious 1,200,000 number?  He takes his average margin of victory vs. CNN and multiplies it by 20.  Since he had roughly 20 shows in the month of August he claims a 1,200,000 viewer victory.

It’s impossible to describe how disingenuous this is.  Literally no one, ever, ever, would describe their ratings in this way if they were trying to be honest.  He’s only using a cumulative monthly total to make the number seem large.

But, let’s just say Ed is dumb, and doesn’t realize how to talk about ratings.  Certainly possible.  Surely, he won’t pick an entirely different way to describe his loss to Fox then…right?

Wrong.  When describing his loss to Fox, he comes up with a completely different measure.  He picks one day, instead of the average for a month (as previously explained).  But he doesn’t pick the most recent day, or a typical day, he picks his best day ever, intentionally  skipping over at least two other days in between. Unsurprisingly, the days he skipped he lost by roughly twice as much.

Then, he doesn’t multiply that number by 20 like he did when talking about CNN–instead he takes his margin of defeat to Fox and DIVIDES it by 1,000.  That gives him “103 points”.   What 103 points means, is 103,000 viewers.

So here are the Ed Math equations:

When describing a win vs. CNN
(Avg margin of victory) times 20 = 1,200,000

When describing a loss vs. Fox News
(Margin of least embarrassing loss) divided by 1,000 = 103

There you go!  Now you can tell your audience you’re winning by 1,200,000, but you’re only losing by 103.

Remember this next time he tells you a stat about health care.

There is one thing regarding the Restoring Honor rally that MLK probably would have been a bit annoyed with…the media coverage of it.  The fascination over the color of skin in the audience instead of the content of the speech.

“predominantly white crowd on the National Mall” — Associated Press

“the predominantly white crowd, many seated on folding chairs” — AFP

“the predominantly white crowd bent over backward” — James Hohmann, Politico

“overwhelmingly white followers” — Ben Adler, Newsweek

“the audience was overwhelmingly white” — Brian Montopoli, CBS

“a vast and overwhelmingly white crowd” — Philip Rucker & Carol Morello, Washington Post

“A relatively dense and overwhelmingly white crowd” — Mark Benjamin, Salon.com

“The crowd, however, was overwhelmingly white.” — Michael A. Memoli and Kim Geiger, LA Times

“Out in the overwhelmingly white audience… politics was everywhere,” —Mitch Potter, Toronto Star

In fact, the people who seemed to be the most colorblind at the event were the audience–wildly clapping for people of all faiths and colors.  The largest applause of the day was probably for Alveda King, niece of MLK.  To their credit, at least one person at the New York Times noticed this.

But one could also call the day a strange, unlooked-for fulfillment of King’s prophecies: 47 years after the “I Have a Dream” speech, here were tens of thousands of white conservatives roaring their approval of its author.

This isn’t just MLK’s dream, it’s two of MLK’s dreams.  The event featured hundreds of thousands of people both being blind to skin color and coming back to God, something you might think a Reverend would appreciate.  (Not Reverend Al of course.  He says MLKs dream was for equal stuff in everybody’s house. Huh?).

But since the media is so focused on color, let’s talk about color.  The word predominantly means “much greater in number or influence” or “most frequent or common”.

Well, the United States population is around 75% white.  That means if you gathered any random crowd in the U.S. for any event, the typical percentage of whites you would expect to see would be 75%.  I don’t say that because it’s good, I say that because I can read numbers.

So, given that you are covering a news story in a country that has a 50 point gap between whites and all other races combined, how is pointing out that the crowd is “predominantly white” news at all?  It’s only worth pointing out when you are trying to paint the crowd as racist, when you have absolutely no evidence of racism.  If they had real racism, they could have reported that.  They didn’t have it, so they went with plan B.

Calling the crowd predominantly white is an attempt to send the signal that the audience kept African Americans out intentionally.  It’s an attempt to diminish the message and the guy giving it by insinuating that “only white people like him”.  Of course, that’s not true at all.

Did the media make sure that they reported the Sharpton rally as predominantly black?  No, and they shouldn’t, because it doesn’t matter.

But until we’re ready to be adults and talk about content of character, let me interject a little reporting of my own.

A predominantly white crowd gathered at the White House Correspondents Dinner…

Politico has revealed a Powerpoint presentation showing how democrats plan on selling their awful health care plan to voters–a valid concern considering around 60% of people want it repealed, depending on the poll.  In the least surprising event in the past 650,000 years-the democrats’ plan on moving away from that whole “Obamacare will reduce the deficit” and “Obamacare will save us money” thing they have been promising.  This is an actual slide from the presentation-take particular note of the last piece of advice:

Don’t “say the law will reduce costs and deficit.”  Here we are-YEARS before the plan will even be implemented-and the democrats are ALREADY admitting to themselves internally what we have been saying for years.  The idea that this health care plan would save money or reduce the deficit was strictly a marketing tool to be used to try and get the bill passed.  It was never a serious idea.

May I say something for the collective audience of this program to the rest of America?  We hate to say that we told you so, but…we told you so.

Back to the strategy: now that the bill is passed, it’s time to move away from that obvious lie towards personal stories, meant to move your emotions.  They even give an example story.  Seriously .

Oh, I hope Lindsay and Jacob are okay!!!  How pathetic is this?  An outside group, giving our supposed leaders example sob stories, about fictional people in fictional situations, so that they can sell to us a bill we don’t want, in a new way.

If these people think this will work, how stupid do they think we are?  That’s not a rhetorical question…it’s actually answered in the Powerpoint.

The very first “additional to do” for their health care plan, is to tell people that it passed.  The people they are trying to win over are so uninformed that they missed the entire health care debate.  They don’t even know that the bill passed.  You wonder how politicians can get so sloppy and arrogant?  Well…why not?  They think the combined IQ of all voters is approximately eleven.

One of our writers, Dan Andros, refers to this phenomenon as the “dummy vote.”  There are enough people paying absolutely no attention anymore, that you can successfully win elections by just targeting the “dummies” with nonsensical claims.  The people paying attention will complain about it, sure, but the “dummies” won’t hear them complain, because they don’t pay attention.  Then you get reelected.

I could quote a bunch of founding fathers talking about how the country will crumble without a diligent and informed electorate.  But instead, let me berate the dummy voters and their lack of interest with the words of Letters To Cleo.*  Why do we have all of these problems in America?

I wish that I could say it’s not because of you.  But…it’s because of you.

It’s no one’s fault but our own that politicians think so little of us.  We’ve given them that power, we’ve dumbed ourselves down to a point that really is utterly embarrassing.  We really should consider changing that.

Don’t believe me?  Think I’m exaggerating? Look at this.

I’m not talking about the words.  I’m talking about the picture.  We have a multi-trillion dollar entitlement that is being explained to our lawmakers by a mediocre poster from Successories. Would anyone be surprised if the financial regulation bill is being described to someone in Washington at this moment with a cat hanging from a branch?

This is the point in the post where I become despondent for the future of America.  DON’T LET GO LITTLE KITTY!!!!!!!   AND DON’T FORGET TO TAKE THE ROAD TO SUCCESS!!!

*90’s rock band.  Each member of which would be instantly suicidal if they were to realize they were being quoted on Glennbeck.com.  I apologize to their families.