C- ....why did CNN even bother! When their efforts were so meaningless! Too bad for Obama it was covered for hours. There are dozens of articles written on Obama's second 100 Days National Report Card.
All internet polls are pretty damn meaningless, and most are pretty easy to manipulate. According to one popular internet poll prior to the election (the name of the website escapes me at the moment), the majority of online voters selected Ron Paul to be the next POTUS. He got ~16K votes, whereas Obama (in 2nd place) got roughly 4K votes. Then the myriad of other candidates (most of whom were prominent political figures that weren't even actual candidates) had <2000 votes apiece.
Now Trinity, by your reasoning, the majority of Americans believed RON MOTHERFUCKIN' PAUL should be elected the 44th POTUS. However, by real-world logic, this is obviously false. Why? ACTUAL polls with a SCIENTIFIC BASIS were conducted and found that Paul had (at most) 3-4% of the population behind him.
This shows that internet polls can be inaccurate in two VERY major ways:
- They're non-scientific. Scientific polls get a sampling of data that roughly represents the US population. The selected people would be split ~50-50 by gender, ~13% black, the political party ratios would be similar to what they are in the US as a whole, etc. Internet polls have no control over that. Any person can vote, throwing off the reliability of such polls.
- You can (generally) vote as many times as you want. If you have programming skills, this becomes even easier, as you could just write a program to spam a poll with certain results. Want proof of this? Look no further than Stephen Colbert or moot (of 4chan). Stephen Colbert got a fucking huge group of people (including myself) to vote that both a bridge in Hungary and the new space station pod be named after him. I voted multiple times when I could, and I know plenty of people who did the same. moot is included on this list because, in an internet poll, he was voted the most influential person of 2008 on Time magazine's website. You can read all about the issues here.
Now back to your point of why CNN would conduct a poll if the results weren't representative of the general population. It's like a straw poll; just get general sense of what self-selected voters (in this case, mostly internet news junkies) think of the issue at hand.
I also have an issue with the fact that this got any coverage ("hours," as you claim, Trinity, but I have to take your word for it, as I get my news from Yahoo! and the BBC) on the news. Not because of the grade (I'd have given him a C+/B- overall in all likelihood), but because it was an unscientific internet poll. I don't feel that any polls of that sort should get any news coverage beyond a passing mention. See the issue with moot in the link above for the potential for fuck-ups in internet polls.