Links Harvested from a Kos Thread

Zogby has been polling the West Wing's Santos/Vinick race. Before tonight's imaginary debate, it was 59/29 Santos, not suprisingly considering the show's fans; they'll re-poll after the debate.

The interactive survey included 4,492 respondents, all of whom identified themselves as viewers of the current season of The West Wing.

Wusses! Ask people who don't watch. Jimmy Smits or Alan Alda, straight up! I'd suggest asking it without the actors' names as a control group of people who know absolutely nothing, but I think they may actually do that anyway.

The survey showed that Santos is trusted more than Vinick to handle most current issues, including immigration, health care, Social Security, abortion, race relations, education, and the environment. Vinick is trusted more to handle international relations, tax cuts, and terrorism. Viewers think both candidates would handle the federal budget with equal aplomb.

I like the overlap between handling health care/SS, "handling" tax cuts, and handling the whole federal budget. You'd think the last would be related to the big economic items in the two candidates' lists of strengths, no?

Nerds attack NFL, utilize graph theory. Or maybe just make pretty graphs of who-beats-who. By the end of the season this will either be interesting or reveal the obvious.

Anyway, the "debate" live-blogging thread was here. I'll add that I'm amazed that the broadcast was allowed to go out with a fake "Live" and "NBC News" graphic (although it didn't look exactly like a real news broadcast would, I think). For a while, my father was in charge of exactly this kind of thing --that is, whether to allow the network news identify to be used in fiction, among other matter of journalistic ethics -- at ABC News, and believe me: no way. But that was about 15 years ago, at another network.
- posted by Don Porges @ 11/06/2005 11:34:00 PM |