| Be less partisan, guys |
 Be less partisan, guys
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Nov. 9th, 2012 @ 11:56 am 
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So, something called The Atlantic Wire has a piece up, with screenshots and videos, glorying in the bit on Fox News when Karl Rove was trying to insist that it was too soon to call Ohio and Megyn Kelly was sent to the stats guys to ask them about the reasoning.
The thing is, some of their summaries go like this:
"They seem very confident," Kelly says, not entirely confident in the nerds.
See, I've watched the footage, and I disagree; I think Megyn Kelly's demeanour throughout is a mixture of the following factors:
1) She thinks this is kind of stupid. If the numbers desk has made the call, then they're going to have reasons, and Karl Rove is being a whiny idiot.
2) She a bit nervous about it, because she mentions that they tried this in rehearsal, and they lost audio (which did happen again), and is, I suspect, worried that this is going to turn into an embarrassing debacle of miscommunication and technical errors.
3) She is politely asking of the stats dudes/nerds (if you're going to be unnecessarily bitchy about it) that they explain their reasoning, for informational purposes, so that the viewers and hosts can understand. She is, in this scene, being a journalist. You can tell, in part, by the way she asks them to explain Karl Rove's theory (and why they disagree with it).
In less diplomatic, journalistic terms, I think her question translates to: "I think what Karl Rove said sounded like bullshit, but I'm not discounting the possibility I didn't understand it correctly, because he also expressed himself badly. Can you explain what he said in a smart way that makes sense, and then explain clearly why he's wrong?" She's not siding with Karl Rove, she's asking the requisite questions for clear information to be conveyed, leaving no ambiguity or confusion.
Seriously. I'm not a fan of Megyn Kelly. In fact, overall, I kind of sincerely dislike her, or at least her public persona.
But in this instance, she was completely unobjectionable, even decent. That piece on the Atlantic Wire is a spectacular example of how people can let their biases overwhelm them to the point where they only look at their ideological opponents as caricatures, rather than people, and it just gets actively unhelpful.
After all, if you can't even see that you're finding common ground with someone on the point of Karl Rove Is A Douchebag, where *can* you ever find it? And if you can't find common ground, how is there any resolution to America's political divides before the Second Civil War?
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