A little surprised

As I was glancing through The Globe online today, I came across a little article that surprised me. Before I get into it, I have to make a confession. I get most of my news through blogs, many of which are right leaning. That may explain my surprise when I read the header to this article. It describes President Bush as "in reelection trouble." I had no idea that this was the case, and my gut reaction was to ascribe the line to liberal media bias and move on. But for some reason, I couldn't let this one go. So I checked out Zogby's most recent poll and sure enough, he has Bush down by 5 points among registered voters, 47% to 42%, in a poll taken from May 10th-13th. Usure exactly how to take this, I looked up a few other polls. As of May 7th-9th, USA today has the two candidates in pretty much a dead heat among likely voters, but has Kerry leading by 5% among registered voters. Fox News also has them tied as of May 18th-19th. What is interesting is that according to the same Fox News article this is an improvement for Bush, who was trailin at the beginning of the month.

What does this have to do with the fact that I get most of my news from blogs? If you had asked me yesterday to guess where Bush is polling right now, I would have put him about 5% ahead of Kerry. I would have been dead wrong, of course, but why? I read several blogs every day, most of which deal with politics, but most of them spend their time defending the president. I think that this may have skewed my view of the race. It is, of course, mostly my fault. I should look at blogs which are left leaning as well. But the fact remains that blogs are not really news outlets. Each blogger writes about what interests him, and almost never gets the comprehensive coverage of a traditional news service. What this all comes down to is that I have made a resolution to make sure to spend more time looking at traditional media, despite its many faults.


UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds links to the same Fox News poll I did. Granted, his insight into it is a little deeper than mine. But I did get there first.


UPDATE II: Josh Chaftez also has an interesting take on some of the polling date from Fox News. Maybe next time I'll take a closer look.....