CJR: State of the Union media prebuttal

In case you missed it, here's my prebuttal to media coverage of the State of the Union, which includes a new introduction to last year's edition.

Comments

[Robert]

If Americans perceive Obama as too partisan, he’ll lose a serious share of his personal popularity.” In reality, however, Obama isn’t likely to significantly increase his approvalor significantly reduce it. And even if he did make a major blunder, we wouldn’t know it from the ill-conceived instant polls of speech watchers that tend to shape reporting and punditry in the aftermath of the State of the Union.

[Richard]

Good call on the instant polling, it selects supporters of the president. However, rather than wait for post-SOTU polling to determine if the president’s approval numbers have changed, many social media outlets use scientifically dubious instant polls of people who watched the speech.