There has been plenty written about the debate in terms of the relative performaces of President Obama and Governer Romney. There has been far less written about the green and yellow lines beneath them that responded as they talked. According to CNN, these lines were instant polls - they were created by a studio audence of undecided voters watching the debate.
Those two lines bothered me more than anything that was said by either candidate. I found myself constantly having to turn my eyes away from the instant polls to try and figure out what the candidates were actually saying. There were a couple of times during the debate where I actually realized that I had been watching the lines and completely missed a sentence or phrase that had just been stated. So from a personal level, the lines bothered me as a viewer.
But as an American citizen, the two lines bothered me even more. I think that they represent everything that is wrong with our political system - an inability to think broadly about the problems facing the country, a focus on soundbites and gaffes over specific policy positions, and a short-term view that is always cast in terms of winners and losers rather than any hope for progress.
Why do we need to know what other people think about what each candidate is saying in order to decide what we think? Why do we need second-by-second updates from a room of people whose choices are no more valid than ours? And how do we know that this group of randomly selected people is actually representative of anything whatsoever. It is a truth proven in academic literature that an experiment that relies on a smalle sample of people can actually sometimes be worse than no experiment at all. Simply put, we are bad at understanding the differences in certainty between a small sample size and a large one. Without any information about the sample size of the instant poll, viewers likely overestimated the validity of the results that were presented on the graph below the video feeds of the two candidates.
CNN should be embarassed for trying to turn an important democratic event into a sports game. It was a decision that may have been in the best interest fo their ratings, but that certainly was not in the best interests of our republic.
