These are called push polls... They were used pretty ruthlessly in the 2000 GOP primary, to quote the wikipedia article:
Voters in South Carolina report being asked "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" an allegation that had no substance but planted the idea of undisclosed allegations in the minds of thousands of primary voters. In Michigan there were reports of polls portraying McCain as being anti-Catholic
But, these are completely mutually exclusive from exit polls. It's true that they are both "polls", and therefore not to be trusted, but how idiotic would it be to try and sway your vote as you were leaving the polling place?
"The government will never choose a simple, cheap and effective solution when it is in competition with a complex, expensive and flawed solution."
What we've learned is that the problem is not so much the government so much as it is people unable to tell the difference between what they are told and what is the truth.
Listen, he cited some very good irrelevant example. Who are you to come barging in with your empirical statistics when he and two of his friends beg to differ?
In an open source project, everyone is already highly-skilled at what they do. Almost everyone will have either degrees in or many years of experience in the relevant field (computer science).
The average supporter of a political "side" has no idea how to run a political campaign. I don't. If I did, I wouldn't be typing this, I would be outside doing it. If were were talking about people who had political science degrees or had many years of experience in political campaigns, then maybe. But the average person has no way of knowing what works politically other than introspectively, and studies have shown that these intuitions are often flat wrong. Hardcore supporters tend to end up "preaching to the choir," presenting arguments that only those who already agreed with them would accept. The average person would have no way of knowing that merely putting gay marriage initiatives on the ballot would "activate republican schemas" in the voting booth, or the idea of running a push poll.
When you're writing a piece of software collectively, everyone has a pretty good idea whether or not the thing actually works at all. Consider the same thing, except you can't ever actually run the software yourself. You can check if the thing works intuitively, but you can't run it yourself to see; you can only put it up on the internet and hope that people download it. How do you run such a project? One person makes some changes, says "This going to look great!" but he can't see it himself, he's only really guessing. Should you accept the patch? Say you have a disagreement about whether there's an error, but both sides can only speak highly subjectively and hypothetically about it. Is it really there? In this sense, it would not be easy to tell whose opinion was really the more veridical... natural biases like preaching to the choir or group-aggrandizement would be very difficult to weed out.
It might get more people involved, which might be a good thing, but from what little I've seen everyone just wants to do idea generation and no one ever does any of the long toiling hours of actually putting it into action...
I hate to say it, but negative tactics work. People tell you that they don't work, but they seem to be saying this because they just don't like them. That's very different from them not working.
Studies show that people fairly consistently say they don't like, and aren't affected by negative advertising, and they also show that people are consistently wrong in those opinions of themselves. People pay more attention to and remember negative ads significantly better than positive ones. They aren't persuaded of the other side, but that was never the point: the point mostly is to convince you to stay home on election day.
And, I might add, haven't you ever noticed how the right-wing propaganda outlets do nothing, NOTHING but villify and demonize the other side? I fail to see how this strategy backfired.
But who am I to oppose the American people God-given right to burn fossile fuel like there is no tomorrow ?
How do you know there is going to be a tomorrow? That a pretty big assumption, from an obvious political liberal like yourself.
There have been as many studies saying there will be a tomorrow as there are that say there won't be. In fact, even scientists say that if there were a tomorrow, there would be absolutely no way to prove it! All this even though how liberal universities are!
Maybe there is going to be a tomorrow. I don't know, I'm not perfect! It's just too early to tell. Frankly I don't care what the liberal media told you to think about this, you should just stop listening to what those eco-terrorists tell you to think. I heard some obviously liberal reporter talking about tomorrow the other day -- look how shameless the liberal bias has become. They don't even try to hide it anymore. Smart people like me know to ignore them, and to listen only to the Godly, confident terrorist-killing right-wing opinionists that are really just like me, whose opinions I pass off as my own, because I'm smart enough to be part of a mindless collective hive of literally unthinkable ignorance, a tragic, unstoppable rolling national and soon international catasphrophe that's really going to kick all those terrorists' asses no matter how much their definition oscillates according to momentary political convenience. That's where the real power is. Give me God and Fox News, however they define each other, that's what I say. I'd rather be ruled by the first 100 non-foreign-sounding names in the phonebook than those liberal scientists and liberal media. Empiricism is a liberal plot.
So, that's why I think the rather biased assumption that there is going to be a tomorrow should be taken with a little grain of salt, which I take to mean that I can pay no attention to it whatsoever. Nyah, nyah, nyah! Score another point for my team.
Mind you, you're still right about the entertainment value of liberal histrionics. Every bit as funny as the antics of conservatives during the Clinton administration. That's all that liberals and conservatives are really good for anyway.
Ha, ha, remember when Clinton lied about sex? That was pretty funny when the conservatives went into hysterics over it and it was funny when they couldn't understand why the rest of the country didn't give a shit.
Ha, ha, remember when Bush lied about war? That was pretty funny when the liberals went into hysterics over it and it was funny when they couldn't understand why the rest of the country didn't give a shit.
One of the things this election should teach us is that what actually happens doesn't matter. How else could the failure to catch Osama bin Laden be taken as a reason to vote Bush?
What actually matters is the way people interpret reality, not reality. If the democrats don't oppose Bush, they will accuse them of being weak. If they do oppose Bush, they will accuse them of being "obstructionist." No matter what happens, there will be some way to define the issue against the Democrats. And they can do this because they literally tell every conservative pundit -- from Mike Savage AM hate radio to David Brooks at the New York Times -- what to say. Every one of them is on the RNC fax list telling them what to say. And most (60-80%, depending on the channel) of the pundits you see on TV are conservative.
"Kerry -- flip-flopper" "vodka -- Absolut" "Gore -- 'said he invented the internet'!" "Cigarettes -- Marlboro" "Clinton -- 'said there was a vast, conservative conspiracy'!" "Beer -- Budweiser"
In both 2000 and 2004, the Republicans were able to define their opponents before they could define themselves. It worked perfectly both times. And they can do this because they tell their components of their media machine what terms to use to describe the issues. And every time it just becomes part of the background noise, and people forget where it ever came from and people assume that was the default position to start with.
Every single conservative issue has some little one-second soundbite to define it, and to frame the issue in terms that are favorable to them. I'm sure you can remember a few of them, if you think back... remember "nation building" and a lack of "end-game strategy" in the war in Bosnia? Or, some meaningless, very short quote like "I didn't inhale" "I invented the internet" or "I voted for it before I voted against it"? Do you think these things just propagated through the media naturally?
No. The goal is, when you think of one concept, you think of the other, just like "Cigarettes... Marlboro". And they can do this because most TV and radio pundits -- the people who tell people how to interpret the news -- are all on the same take. The sooner we realize that reality is the least important part of the equation the better.
IMPORTANT: The contents of this email and attachments are confidential and may be subject to legal privilege and/or protected by copyright. Copying or communicating any part of it to others is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you are not the intended recipient you must not use, copy, distribute or rely on this email and should please return it immediately or notify us by telephone. While we take every reasonable precaution to screen out computer viruses from emails, attachments to this email may contain such viruses. We cannot accept liability for loss or damage resulting from such viruses. We recommend you carry out your own virus checks.
Aside from the cute bit about email viruses, as I understand it warnings like this are just bullshit scare tactics. You're not allowed to show it to anyone? Not even your own lawyer?
That chart is a fake (despite its subjective explanatory power). There is no way that IQ could vary so much from average with such large sample sizes (ie, the population of a state).
There is plenty of more objective (ie, not made up) evidence that Bush voters are less informed, not necessarily less intelligent. Clicky one and two and see.
Well, we've had 100+ years now of an era of empirical psychological research.
And, the status of the catharthis/contagion debate in this context is... I hate to say it (I was a big CS fan, myself), but there is no scientific support for the cartharthis hypothesis, but there is some support for contagion. One of the classics is the Bobo doll experiment, in which children who saw a person attacking a doll soon imitated it later. In adults, the effect is not as strong, but it's still there. There is no experiment that I'm aware of that shows the viewing of or participation in some form of conflagration or violence makes its repetition less likely, though there are unfortunately quite a few that show the opposite. So, while this debate may be intractable a prioi, it may not be experimentally.
Besides, if you keep voting for the lesser of two evils, you're going to keep getting--you guessed it--evil!
As soon as the Green/Libertarian/Constitution/Socialist parties become actually viable, they will look like the lesser of n-evils, too. Things seem a lot better when they're only hypothetical.
Repeating an action and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanty
Look up "Third parties in the United States, History of."
Third parties have never been viable in this country because of the voting system, (ie first-past-the-post), not because of anything the two dominant parties do.
Voting for a third party in a winner-takes-all voting system is like a policy of Mutually Assured Destruction: to get what you want, you have to maintain a credible threat to vote for the third party, but if you actually do it then you're both totally screwed.
If you don't like it there are other voting systems out there that are a bit more complicated to understand but make a lot more sense in the end IMHO.
In fact, Bush's main speech issues are that when he pauses, he tends to pause for a long time, and he tends to paraphrase himself to fill up time. It's not hard to understand what he's trying to say because he doesn't speak English well, but rather because he doesn't know what he's trying to say.
Then there's always the earpiece theory: Bush talks that way, long pauses and seemingly paraphrasing because he's actually listening to someone else telling him what to say and going off of that.
Here's another example:
if you watch
the press conference starting at about 13:23, Bush is going through a list of names of Al Qaeda terrorists they have caught and he stumbles over the name of Ramzi Binalshibh, eventually calling him Ramzi Alshibh. He jokingly apologizes to Ramzi if he got his name wrong and then, at 13:32, he looks down and to his right intently for about 2 seconds, like he is listening to something, and looks up and says "Binalshibh, excuse me."
The press conference in question is here, and I thought that this photo interesting.
Jeb Bush had 50,000 thousand African American names purged off the voting rolls in Florida... No one out there, that I know of, is really accusing that this sort of fraud took place 4 years ago.
The state had tried to keep the list a secret. It fought a lawsuit aimed at opening the records to the public. A series of errors emerged once a Tallahassee judge rejected the state's arguments and released the records on July 1. The error that proved final -- and garnered national attention -- was that Hispanics were largely overlooked because of glitches in how the state records information about race and ethnicity. The list was created by cross-checking voter registration and criminal records. Of the more than 47,000 voters on the potential felon list, Hispanics made up one tenth of 1 percent -- this in a state where nearly 1 in 5 residents is Hispanic. Florida Secretary of State Glenda Hood issued a written statement Saturday saying the exclusion of Hispanics was "unintentional and unforeseen." "We are deeply concerned and disappointed that this has occurred," Hood said. . . . Many Hispanic voters vote Republican.
Let's recap:
Say "2000, never again!" Come up with a new felon list
Refuse to show the list to anyone
Refuse to show the list to anyone under public pressure
When forced to by a court order.... admit that horrible, horrible "mistakes" were made, and by some incredible coincidence, the list was again totally slanted against the democratic party...
Re:I can't help but notice...
on
Don't Read My Lips
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I can't help but notice that a sample size of 8 is not statistically significant. You could probably find correlations with the colors of their ties, the number of times they blinked, or the position of the moon with a sample size that small.
(11 elections since 1960, minus 3 for which there were no debates.)
The terrorists' biggest failure has been their failure to get Donald Rumsfeld's memos.
Look at Iraq: the terrorists just don't understand that the war is "really" about air power, which is why we can win with such a small number of ground troops. Yet their small, sporadic attacks go unchallenged because they can't understand this basic fact. The paradigm has shifted, and they're still fighting yesterday's wars.
Bin Laden's biggest failure occurred when he and the Al Qaeda leadership esaped at Tora Bora. It proved they don't understand that the fight was "really" about air power, which is why US ground troops were not needed. Moreover, bin Laden can't seem to understand that terrorism is "really" a state problem, which is why toppling states like Iraq is going to pull the rug from under him. And Iraq was at the "geographical center" of those who attacked us on 9/11. Doesn't he understand the basic reality principle that's operating here.
If Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the insurgency in Iraq, and the rest of reality would just get the memo, then all this fighting would be over a lot sooner. I'm just glad we have leaders who understand this.
Business goes wherever the business press tells it to go -- think "Buy internet stocks now! Will this gravy train ever end?" -- and, I don't know if you've ever read any, but is pretty well analogized to Teen Beat and its fellow travellers: dumb, marketing is job #1, idiotic hysteria, herd behavior, PR-whoring if not outright shilling for the moneyed interests. What you read in any business publication is mostly adapted from press releases. What solution is actually better from a technical point of view never comes into play -- and Microsoft knows this. They've always known it, and that's how they've gotten as far as they have. (Incidentally, this is the same way we make political decisions in this country.)
Jon Stewart is constrained by the commercial format of his show in ways similar that Carlson et al. are constrained by the commercial formats of their shows. For e.g., Jon Stewart has to be funny.
Ah, but in order to be funny, you have to be accurate and relevant. The same is not true of entertainment, which news shows try to be.
Slashdot Mirror
But, these are completely mutually exclusive from exit polls. It's true that they are both "polls", and therefore not to be trusted, but how idiotic would it be to try and sway your vote as you were leaving the polling place?
"The government will never choose a simple, cheap and effective solution when it is in competition with a complex, expensive and flawed solution."
What we've learned is that the problem is not so much the government so much as it is people unable to tell the difference between what they are told and what is the truth.
Listen, he cited some very good irrelevant example. Who are you to come barging in with your empirical statistics when he and two of his friends beg to differ?
No way.
In an open source project, everyone is already highly-skilled at what they do. Almost everyone will have either degrees in or many years of experience in the relevant field (computer science).
The average supporter of a political "side" has no idea how to run a political campaign. I don't. If I did, I wouldn't be typing this, I would be outside doing it. If were were talking about people who had political science degrees or had many years of experience in political campaigns, then maybe. But the average person has no way of knowing what works politically other than introspectively, and studies have shown that these intuitions are often flat wrong. Hardcore supporters tend to end up "preaching to the choir," presenting arguments that only those who already agreed with them would accept. The average person would have no way of knowing that merely putting gay marriage initiatives on the ballot would "activate republican schemas" in the voting booth, or the idea of running a push poll.
When you're writing a piece of software collectively, everyone has a pretty good idea whether or not the thing actually works at all. Consider the same thing, except you can't ever actually run the software yourself. You can check if the thing works intuitively, but you can't run it yourself to see; you can only put it up on the internet and hope that people download it. How do you run such a project? One person makes some changes, says "This going to look great!" but he can't see it himself, he's only really guessing. Should you accept the patch? Say you have a disagreement about whether there's an error, but both sides can only speak highly subjectively and hypothetically about it. Is it really there? In this sense, it would not be easy to tell whose opinion was really the more veridical... natural biases like preaching to the choir or group-aggrandizement would be very difficult to weed out.
It might get more people involved, which might be a good thing, but from what little I've seen everyone just wants to do idea generation and no one ever does any of the long toiling hours of actually putting it into action...
I hate to say it, but negative tactics work. People tell you that they don't work, but they seem to be saying this because they just don't like them. That's very different from them not working.
Studies show that people fairly consistently say they don't like, and aren't affected by negative advertising, and they also show that people are consistently wrong in those opinions of themselves. People pay more attention to and remember negative ads significantly better than positive ones. They aren't persuaded of the other side, but that was never the point: the point mostly is to convince you to stay home on election day.
And, I might add, haven't you ever noticed how the right-wing propaganda outlets do nothing, NOTHING but villify and demonize the other side? I fail to see how this strategy backfired.
But who am I to oppose the American people God-given right to burn fossile fuel like there is no tomorrow ?
How do you know there is going to be a tomorrow? That a pretty big assumption, from an obvious political liberal like yourself.
There have been as many studies saying there will be a tomorrow as there are that say there won't be. In fact, even scientists say that if there were a tomorrow, there would be absolutely no way to prove it! All this even though how liberal universities are!
Maybe there is going to be a tomorrow. I don't know, I'm not perfect! It's just too early to tell. Frankly I don't care what the liberal media told you to think about this, you should just stop listening to what those eco-terrorists tell you to think. I heard some obviously liberal reporter talking about tomorrow the other day -- look how shameless the liberal bias has become. They don't even try to hide it anymore. Smart people like me know to ignore them, and to listen only to the Godly, confident terrorist-killing right-wing opinionists that are really just like me, whose opinions I pass off as my own, because I'm smart enough to be part of a mindless collective hive of literally unthinkable ignorance, a tragic, unstoppable rolling national and soon international catasphrophe that's really going to kick all those terrorists' asses no matter how much their definition oscillates according to momentary political convenience. That's where the real power is. Give me God and Fox News, however they define each other, that's what I say. I'd rather be ruled by the first 100 non-foreign-sounding names in the phonebook than those liberal scientists and liberal media. Empiricism is a liberal plot.
So, that's why I think the rather biased assumption that there is going to be a tomorrow should be taken with a little grain of salt, which I take to mean that I can pay no attention to it whatsoever. Nyah, nyah, nyah! Score another point for my team.
"You will give your rifle a girls name, because this is the only pussy you are gonna get!"
Can you get the internet on these rifles?
Mind you, you're still right about the entertainment value of liberal histrionics. Every bit as funny as the antics of conservatives during the Clinton administration. That's all that liberals and conservatives are really good for anyway.
Ha, ha, remember when Clinton lied about sex? That was pretty funny when the conservatives went into hysterics over it and it was funny when they couldn't understand why the rest of the country didn't give a shit.
Ha, ha, remember when Bush lied about war? That was pretty funny when the liberals went into hysterics over it and it was funny when they couldn't understand why the rest of the country didn't give a shit.
You couldn't be more wrong....
One of the things this election should teach us is that what actually happens doesn't matter. How else could the failure to catch Osama bin Laden be taken as a reason to vote Bush?
What actually matters is the way people interpret reality, not reality. If the democrats don't oppose Bush, they will accuse them of being weak. If they do oppose Bush, they will accuse them of being "obstructionist." No matter what happens, there will be some way to define the issue against the Democrats. And they can do this because they literally tell every conservative pundit -- from Mike Savage AM hate radio to David Brooks at the New York Times -- what to say. Every one of them is on the RNC fax list telling them what to say. And most (60-80%, depending on the channel) of the pundits you see on TV are conservative.
"Kerry -- flip-flopper"
"vodka -- Absolut"
"Gore -- 'said he invented the internet'!"
"Cigarettes -- Marlboro"
"Clinton -- 'said there was a vast, conservative conspiracy'!"
"Beer -- Budweiser"
In both 2000 and 2004, the Republicans were able to define their opponents before they could define themselves. It worked perfectly both times. And they can do this because they tell their components of their media machine what terms to use to describe the issues. And every time it just becomes part of the background noise, and people forget where it ever came from and people assume that was the default position to start with.
Every single conservative issue has some little one-second soundbite to define it, and to frame the issue in terms that are favorable to them. I'm sure you can remember a few of them, if you think back... remember "nation building" and a lack of "end-game strategy" in the war in Bosnia? Or, some meaningless, very short quote like "I didn't inhale" "I invented the internet" or "I voted for it before I voted against it"? Do you think these things just propagated through the media naturally?
No. The goal is, when you think of one concept, you think of the other, just like "Cigarettes... Marlboro". And they can do this because most TV and radio pundits -- the people who tell people how to interpret the news -- are all on the same take. The sooner we realize that reality is the least important part of the equation the better.
There's a lot of economists that tend to believe Kerry would be awful for the economy. Six of them are nobel laureates.
Kerry was endorsed by 10 nobel prize winners in economics. )And 38 more in the other nobel disciplines.) It may be true that "a lot" of economists were against Kerry, what "most" of them did was another story.
Aside from the cute bit about email viruses, as I understand it warnings like this are just bullshit scare tactics. You're not allowed to show it to anyone? Not even your own lawyer?
If you want to see a more sensible response to a Cease and Desist letter, see this one in response to a Apple C & D from an actual lawyer.
IANAL YMMV This post does not constitute legal advice
That chart is a fake (despite its subjective explanatory power). There is no way that IQ could vary so much from average with such large sample sizes (ie, the population of a state).
There is plenty of more objective (ie, not made up) evidence that Bush voters are less informed, not necessarily less intelligent. Clicky one and two and see.
Well, we've had 100+ years now of an era of empirical psychological research.
And, the status of the catharthis/contagion debate in this context is... I hate to say it (I was a big CS fan, myself), but there is no scientific support for the cartharthis hypothesis, but there is some support for contagion. One of the classics is the Bobo doll experiment, in which children who saw a person attacking a doll soon imitated it later. In adults, the effect is not as strong, but it's still there. There is no experiment that I'm aware of that shows the viewing of or participation in some form of conflagration or violence makes its repetition less likely, though there are unfortunately quite a few that show the opposite. So, while this debate may be intractable a prioi, it may not be experimentally.
And I, for one, welcome our new Chinese overlords.
--
I'd like to remind them that as a trusted slashdot commenter I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
Besides, if you keep voting for the lesser of two evils, you're going to keep getting--you guessed it--evil!
As soon as the Green/Libertarian/Constitution/Socialist parties become actually viable, they will look like the lesser of n-evils, too. Things seem a lot better when they're only hypothetical.
Repeating an action and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanty
Look up "Third parties in the United States, History of."
Third parties have never been viable in this country because of the voting system, (ie first-past-the-post), not because of anything the two dominant parties do.
Voting for a third party in a winner-takes-all voting system is like a policy of Mutually Assured Destruction: to get what you want, you have to maintain a credible threat to vote for the third party, but if you actually do it then you're both totally screwed.
If you don't like it there are other voting systems out there that are a bit more complicated to understand but make a lot more sense in the end IMHO.
Slashdot wasn't up to 5 digit id's 6 years ago
Then there's always the earpiece theory: Bush talks that way, long pauses and seemingly paraphrasing because he's actually listening to someone else telling him what to say and going off of that.
Here's another example:
The press conference in question is here, and I thought that this photo interesting.
They tried to do the same thing this year:
Let's recap:
Say "2000, never again!" Come up with a new felon list
Refuse to show the list to anyone
Refuse to show the list to anyone under public pressure
When forced to by a court order.... admit that horrible, horrible "mistakes" were made, and by some incredible coincidence, the list was again totally slanted against the democratic party...
Election's only a couple days away now...
ignorance != mental illness. It's quite normal.
I can't help but notice that a sample size of 8 is not statistically significant. You could probably find correlations with the colors of their ties, the number of times they blinked, or the position of the moon with a sample size that small.
(11 elections since 1960, minus 3 for which there were no debates.)
The terrorists' biggest failure has been their failure to get Donald Rumsfeld's memos.
Look at Iraq: the terrorists just don't understand that the war is "really" about air power, which is why we can win with such a small number of ground troops. Yet their small, sporadic attacks go unchallenged because they can't understand this basic fact. The paradigm has shifted, and they're still fighting yesterday's wars.
Bin Laden's biggest failure occurred when he and the Al Qaeda leadership esaped at Tora Bora. It proved they don't understand that the fight was "really" about air power, which is why US ground troops were not needed. Moreover, bin Laden can't seem to understand that terrorism is "really" a state problem, which is why toppling states like Iraq is going to pull the rug from under him. And Iraq was at the "geographical center" of those who attacked us on 9/11. Doesn't he understand the basic reality principle that's operating here.
I can't emphasize enough the number of memos that these guys failed to get. The White House, on the other hand, understands these ideas perfectly. Bin Laden doesn't, and that just shows how irrelevant he is. Look, neither the words "Al Qaeda" nor "Osama bin Laden" appeared more than once in any major speech at the RNC convention, though 9/11 and "terror" were invoked dozens of times. It just shows how irrelevant he is now. Before this tape, Bush has only mentioned his name a handful of times in the past 2 years!
People like him believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. If he would just get Rumsfeld's memos, then he would understand this. He would know that in the new paradigm, he can't win. He would know how defeated he is!
If Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the insurgency in Iraq, and the rest of reality would just get the memo, then all this fighting would be over a lot sooner. I'm just glad we have leaders who understand this.
Business goes wherever the business press tells it to go -- think "Buy internet stocks now! Will this gravy train ever end?" -- and, I don't know if you've ever read any, but is pretty well analogized to Teen Beat and its fellow travellers: dumb, marketing is job #1, idiotic hysteria, herd behavior, PR-whoring if not outright shilling for the moneyed interests. What you read in any business publication is mostly adapted from press releases. What solution is actually better from a technical point of view never comes into play -- and Microsoft knows this. They've always known it, and that's how they've gotten as far as they have. (Incidentally, this is the same way we make political decisions in this country.)
An obvious instance of the Gambler's fallacy.
Chance is not self-correcting.
Jon Stewart is constrained by the commercial format of his show in ways similar that Carlson et al. are constrained by the commercial formats of their shows. For e.g., Jon Stewart has to be funny.
Ah, but in order to be funny, you have to be accurate and relevant. The same is not true of entertainment, which news shows try to be.