John Kerry in his new fundraising letter:
There is no way to hide the pain - and no point in trying.
I mean, the victory in 1896 was similarly narrow, and I mean — not narrow, similarly structured.
WASTLER: Going into the election, people are saying this is the year of true democracy because we got the bloggers for the people who don't know, a blogger is -- essentially it's an open web diary. People just write their little dribble and ramblings on and on and on.ROMANS: Dribble and ramblings, you said it.
WASTLER: I said it. I haven't been a fan of these places because essentially there's no editorial structure there. There's no vetting. It's just people shooting from the hip and saying what they feel. There have been cases when it's not bad, where a news event happens and a lot of people critique it. They come out and say the people have spoken and they sort of express a point of view.
However, going into the election, they are saying now we'll be the responsible ones and we'll tell people what is really going on. They have ludicrous exit poll information. We got this from the big media groups and this and that and the other and it was wrong. It sort of made the market do a little loopty loop on Election Day.
ROMANS: Just because now for the first time the major media isn't using those exit polls.
WASTLER: The thing is, they weren't even the right exit polls. CNN, we had a lockdown on the exit polls. Eyes only, only if you really need to see it. And so the numbers that they had out there, I don't know where they got them from, maybe the bathroom wall.
ROMANS: I want to just defend the web logs for a second, the blogs, because Thomas Paine, remember the revolutionary -- He was the original blogger.
WASTLER: He would be blogging now.
ROMANS: Revolutionaries, you know who were sending off these little pamphlets. Those are like the revolutionary war blogs.
WASTLER: And it's time for expressing opinion. I have no problem with that. But I do have a problem where they are saying we are giving you reliable information because it's not. Opinion and information are different things and you should clarify that. Also a lot of people saying they are going to be the ultimate web destination. Take a look at the traffic figures. PK, big outfits like cnn.com was getting upwards of 5 million. But --
SERWER: Not to toot our own horn.
WASTLER: But not to toot our own horn, and those are the network figures, OK. But the web logs, even the biggest ones, they didn't even crack a hundred thousand. Collectively some experts have noted to me collectively, they might have done a big chunk of traffic like maybe upwards of 15 million unique visitors but each one individually, no.
"I don't know where they got them from, maybe the bathroom wall?"
Slate believes its readers should know as much about the unfolding election as the anchors and other journalists, so given the proviso that the early numbers are no more conclusive than the midpoint score of a baseball game, we're publishing the exit-poll numbers as we receive them.National Review Online Staff: bush down 4 in ohio, down 4 in fla, downm 1 in NM, down 1 in mich, down 2 iowa As Kathryn said, these early reports are unreliable, but these are numbers we just got from a major newsroom. Take with a grain of salt.
"Even the biggest ones, they didn't even crack a hundred thousand?"
Daily Kos Site SummaryVISITS
Average Per Day 520,622
"Dribble and ramblings, you said it?"
Tried watching your own show lately, morons?