On Monday, Jon Stewart showed up on Bill O’Reilly’s show to debate (of all stupid things) the invitation of rapper Common to the White House. On O’Reilly’s own website, they put up a poll question: Who won the debate?
The answer: An overwhelming 79% voted for Stewart.
Did “Daily Show” fans swamp O’Reilly’s site and vote for their guy? Did O’Reilly’s own people just shake their heads and say, “Bill, you brought a knife to a gun fight.” Or was it some combination of the two?
PAD
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Jon Stewart should be ashamed of himself, engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent.
Why? A lot of us do it here all the time.
Never argue with an idiot. He’ll drag you down to his level and then beat you with experience.
“Did “Daily Show” fans swamp O’Reilly’s site and vote for their guy?”
Well, you know that O’Reilly’s camp is going to claim that was the case…
Bill already presented that defense on his show.
Why am I not surprised.
I never watch Bill’s show if I can avoid it.
The thing is, I’d guess that the vast, vast majority of Stewart fans don’t frequent O’Reilly’s website and wouldn’t know about any poll being taken.
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Here’s something interesting, though: the poll appears, at least as of this moment, to have vanished from O’Reilly’s site. Funny, that.
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PAD
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Of course it’s gone. He’s never wrong, and he has the power of the edit and the webmaster to maintain that illusion as much as he possibly can.
That is b.s. O’Reilly simply lost the debate. it’s that simple.
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“That is b.s. O’Reilly simply lost the debate. it’s that simple.”
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Uhm… Yes, we all know that and have all said that O’Reilly simply lost the debate. That being the case, I’m not real sure what you’re calling b.s. and correcting us about here.
Um, Jerry, I don’t mean to put words into Jerome’s mouth, (and I’m sure he’ll correct me if I am wrong). But I believe that Jerome was calling b.s. on the notion that “Daily Show” fans swamped O’Reilly’s site and vote for their guy?”
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The poll might as well have been “Who do you think was the smartest of the Three Stooges?”
I don’t think FOX News viewers are cultured enough for such a heady discussion.
Right, Storymark. Fox News viewers all fit under a monolithic umbrella and cannot grasp high-concept cultured fare. like “The Ed Show”.
Fox News viewers all fit under a monolithic umbrella and cannot grasp high-concept cultured fare.
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Well, they’re watching Fox News in the first place, so…
Darin,
Really? Bill O’Reilly is not an idiot and Jon Stewart is one of the smartest people on TV.
Bill O’Reilly randomly picks topics to be liberal about in order to appear “independent.” I like Stewart slightly more than I like O’Reilly because Stewart is more consistent when it comes to ideology… but I find them both to be a couple of bøøbš in general. (So, yes, really.)
Moe.
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PAD
Larry, actually.
Moe just THOUGHT he was the smartest.
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PAD: “Did “Daily Show” fans swamp O’Reilly’s site and vote for their guy? Did O’Reilly’s own people just shake their heads and say, “Bill, you brought a knife to a gun fight.” Or was it some combination of the two?”
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I’d say it was some combination of the two. However, Daily Show fans have been known to tell John when they think he’s wrong, so I doubt that they’re all suddenly lock-stepping now. Besides, when it comes to option #1…
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storymark: “Bill already presented that defense on his show.”
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Bill O’Reilly is an idiot. (And in other news, the sun came up today and should do so again tomorrow.) He always likes to boast about his high ratings and here’s where they might actually matter.
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See, in Bill’s world, a TV show on a channel that “has practically no viewers” and that “nobody watches” had enough viewers to come in and swamp his viewers in his little poll despite his promoting his show as the highest rated show ever in the history of mankind and cable news every other time he opens his mouth. Yeah, that’s consistency and logic for you.
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So, of course, Fox News viewers will swallow it like fresh baked apple pie and agree with that as the reason he was made to look like an ignorant jáçkášš yet again.
Jerry,
Okay. this is too much. I am a fox news viewer. I don’t go into withdrawals if i go a day or two or even longer without watching them, since there are other sources I go to.
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But the fact is, I respect O’Reilly AND Stewart and simply based on my open-minded observations, thought that Stewart indeed won this debate.
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Is it not possible that, rather than “Daily Show” fans flooding the poll with votes for Stewart, that there are more open-minded Fox viewers and O’Reilly fans who simply feel Stewart won the debate?
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Or would giving “Fox viewers’ that much credit blow your narrative?
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“Is it not possible that, rather than “Daily Show” fans flooding the poll with votes for Stewart, that there are more open-minded Fox viewers and O’Reilly fans who simply feel Stewart won the debate?”
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Yes, it’s very possible. That’s basically the option I went with. I give the benefit of the doubt to the charge that some Daily Show fans voted for “their guy” in the debate, but then I pointed out that it would be unlikely to get the results they got based on the number of viewers each show has. If it wasn’t clear enough above, I found it funny that O’Reilly would use that excuse since he knows that his ratings and viewer numbers are easily double those of the Daily Show and often takes jabs at their ratings. To get the poll results that he did, there would have to have been a fair chunk of O’Reilly viewers who voted for Stewart.
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“Or would giving “Fox viewers’ that much credit blow your narrative?”
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Well, it wouldn’t because I did give some of them that much credit. Now, if you’re referring to this line of mine –
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“So, of course, Fox News viewers will swallow it like fresh baked apple pie and agree with that as the reason he was made to look like an ignorant jáçkášš yet again.”
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Well, that’s a swipe at a large chunk of O’Reilly viewers based on past incidents where large numbers of them turned a blind eye to reality when Bill either said he never said something that there’s video and audio records of him saying or claiming that he wasn’t wrong when he was and then slandering everyone else who pointed out the truth. In my experience with O’Reilly fans, that is a large chunk of his audience and I have no doubt that, despite common sense and reality, they will now be parroting the O’Reilly claim that he actually won the debate, but the poll was messed up by all those pesky Daily Show fans flooding the poll with their votes.
Lose the chip on your shoulder, Jerome. I think most people here, including me, think that O’Reilly’s own viewers gave this one to Stewart. But naturally O’Reilly believed it was skewed by “Daily Show” fans and then deleted the poll entirely. He’s the one with the narrative: not Jerry and not me.
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PAD
I was kinda thinking the same thing, Jerome.
Jerry, PAD and Luigi,
Okay. My bad. i misinterpreted what you were trying to get across. On first read, i thought you were saying that Stewart’s viewers (“more cultured”, according to some on this thread) pushed him over the top to such a commanding win.
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I see now that interpretation of what you were trying to get across was incorrect.
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Sorry.
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Cool. Easy to read too fast and not catch something the first time with today being such a rushed day for everyone and all. Preparing for tomorrow’s post Rapture looting takes a lot of time and effort away from such things as blogging. Now if I could only figure out which rooms get the new HD TVs…
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19 minutes to go.
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🙂
Not until 6pm local time, Jerry. Don’t jump the gun!
When O’Reilly appeared on Bill Maher’s show, we made a big deal of the fact that his presence alone was enough to inflate Maher’s ratings because all of his people would tune in to see it. So by extension, wouldn’t a good percentage of Daily Show viewers tune in to O’Reilly’s show?
Sure. But did O’Reilly say on his show, “Who do you think won this debate? Go vote?”
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Furthermore, if you check the total number of people who voted, it’s pretty much within the same total number as other topics on the site (indeed, less than some.) If this had been flooded by Daily Show fans, and assuming that all of O’Reilly’s normal people had voted, wouldn’t the total vote numbers be through the roof?
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PAD
Sorry, what I meant to say in my last post was ‘He made a big deal…’ he being O’Reilly of course. Guess I can’t concentrate properly with the Rapture coming up and all that. But your point is still valid,Peter. I’m sure the IT analysts have a fair idea what their viewer base is and the percentage that will take the time to vote. If there’s a sudden spike, it wouldn’t take much too figure out where it came from.
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“I’m sure the IT analysts have a fair idea what their viewer base is and the percentage that will take the time to vote. If there’s a sudden spike, it wouldn’t take much too figure out where it came from.”
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But even then, does it matter? You invite someone on who has a viewer base different than your own and ask everyone who saw the show in question to vote. Doesn’t that include the viewer base the other guy brings with him? But the catch here is that I we don’t even know if there was a voter spike or not. Since O’Reilly deleted the poll results we can’t see the number of voters and compare that number to the polls from the rest of the month.
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But he pulled it and the numbers so that we can’t compare the numbers. That actually leads me to believe that numbers were well in line with the usual voter averages. If he could point to a sudden spike of double or triple the usual voter average he would. Since he deleted the only evidence of his claim of Daily Show viewers flooding the poll, it leads me to believe the numbers were more in line with his usual voter averages and he simply had that inconvenient fact deleted when he decided he would make up this excuse for losing his debate with Stewart.
Yeah, we can, Jerry. The Huffpost linked to it before it went away and I saw the total. It was around 72,000.
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PAD
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Around 72,000?
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Then it falls in line with the average. Looking at the April votes on like issues, the range goes up and down anywhere from 67,000 to 85,000.
I’m sorry to say that I missed the debate. I bet it was hysterical.
Didn’t know about the poll, either, but I’ve NEVER heard of Jon Stewart losing a debate he came prepared for (at least no REAL ones), so it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that Bill lost.
This whole Common nonsense was ridiculous from the start. Did Fox News REALLY think that Elmo’s “good friend” was supporting violence in his music? REALLY?
Yup. That’s what I was saying. You can find it yourself if you like. Just go to the Huffpost site, enter “Jon Stewart” in the search engine, go to the article on the poll, and there’s a screen capture of it right there. I think the exact number is something like 72,125, and it clearly says that the poll is closed, so it’s not as if an additional 100,000 people chimed in.
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So the notion that tens of thousands of “Daily Show” people jumped in to skew the numbers really isn’t supportable. So the odds are it really was O’Reilly’s own people who basically said, “You blew this one, big guy.” Which of course O’Reilly wound up deleting because it didn’t track with his narrative.
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PAD
Personally, I think the big loser in all this is Obama. The country has some very serious financial problems to worry about *and* he managed to kill get Osama bin Laden killed pretty dámņ recently, and we’re debating about a rapper being invited to the White House?
At least with Trump gone, it’s unlikely we’ll be hearing more calls to prove that Obama earned his college grades…
Seriously, All you could think of Obama’s college grades now? Then I’m sure Obama is doing dámņ well.
I have a hypothesis I can’t prove with a great deal of certainty yet. Most Fox News viewers are people who disagree with their editorial viewpoint. They tune in to get riled up, have a good laugh, etc. A few months back Greta Van Susteran put up a poll on whether her viewers thought she was an idiot. The vast majority voted yes. Fox wants to believe that its ratings means greater acceptance of its political leanings. I don’t think it does.