Why are we so beset with polls so long before an election? An election whose candidates are still unknown?  Just to be clear, these are not opinion polls, nor election polls; they are variants of push polls.  These polls are used not to reflect public opinion, but to try to shape opinion or grow an audience. The viewership or readership of “news outlets” is valuable property, and the size of the pie is surprisingly fixed.  Oh, there is the occasional banquet, when a disaster occurs, but the devoted news followers are a very small percentage of the public. Thus, the outlets are trying to win converts, and they are all fishing in the same pond.  But most importantly, they must hold the faithful, by creating a climate, which stimulates them with sensationalist stories.  In this environment, the sensationalism must be staged during lulls in actual news.  So, the shocking, surprising, unexpected, breaking news is staged by using...(Read Full Article)