Yesterday, I noted that Newsweek conducted a poll showing Hillary Clinton leading all of the top-tier Republican candidates in a hypothetical presidential match-up, and Barack Obama doing nearly as well, but the magazine neglected to report the results in its cover story about Clinton, Obama, and 2008.
Newsday, reporting on the results, noted the omission and got a response from the magazine.
The Newsweek numbers on the head-to-head presidential match-ups were not publicized by the magazine. They appeared in a press release on the magazine’s Web site but weren’t included in a Clinton-Barack Obama cover story, which focused on whether Americans were receptive to black or female presidential candidates. A Newsweek editor said the poll match-ups were not pertinent to the cover story.
I’ve been trying to get a sense of why Newsweek would leave these extremely relevant poll results out — in a poll the magazine paid for — but the “not pertinent” explanation is rather odd. As Atrios put it, “Right. The poll numbers regarding how receptive voters were to Clinton and Obama were not pertinent to a cover story ‘which focused on whether Americans were receptive to black or female presidential candidates.'”
Apparently, Clinton aides would like an explanation as well. Who could blame them?
Greg Sargent has been looking into this a bit.
As we reported below, Newsweek magazine yesterday released a poll showing Hillary Clinton beating both John McCain and Rudy Giuliani in head-to-head matchups — but mysteriously didn’t include the stunning numbers in this week’s big cover story about the electability of both Clinton and Barack Obama.
Now Clinton’s advisers are demanding an explanation for the glaring omission. A source close to the Clinton camp tells Election Central that her advisers have privately requested an explanation from Jonathan Alter, the author of the piece, and from Jon Meacham, the mag’s editor. The source adds that Alter has yet to respond to the Clinton camp’s entreaty. Meacham, meanwhile, has responded but has yet to offer any kind of explanation, the source tells us. The Clinton people are continuing privately to press their case.
This isn’t a Newsweek-bashing exercise; indeed, I generally like Newsweek quite a bit (I’m even a subscriber). But the magazine’s handling of this is troubling.
Steve M. makes the case that the poll results conflicted with the preferred media narrative, so they had to be discarded. I hope that’s not the case.
Logically, the predictable answers don’t work. It doesn’t seem to be an issue of space, for example, because Newsweek’s Clinton/Obama article was 4,000 words long. It’s not an issue of disregarding all of the poll, because the article cited several results from the same survey before omitting the most important part.
Why would Newsweek chose to not give readers the whole story? At this point, the “not pertinent” reasoning is wholly unsatisfying. Stay tuned.