Politico shows how not to report on campaign contributions

More proof of how manipulative politico is. :grr:

Politico shows how not to report on campaign contributions

May 06, 2010 4:14 pm ET by Jamison Foser

Earlier, Eric Boehlert (and Time's Michael Scherer) noted Politico's efforts to hype campaign contributions Barack Obama's campaigns received from employees of BP. I'm going to spell out two pieces of context the Politico article was missing, because I think it's an excellent example of how not to report on campaign contributions:



So, Politico puts Obama in the headline and the lede because he has received more money from people who work for BP than any other elected official. But if you're trying to assess how much influence a company may have over a politician, looking at raw contribution amounts can be badly misleading. You need to consider how much of the politician's war chest the company provided. And that's where it becomes clear that the focus on Obama is absurd.

See, Barack Obama has raised $799 million for his campaigns. The $77,051 he got from BP employees is a drop in the bucket -- just one one-hundredth of one percent of his total campaign cash.

Meanwhile, Rep. Don Young -- mentioned only in passing by Politico -- has taken $73,300 from BP during his time in Congress, out of a total of $14.9 million raised. So BP contributions account for about one half of one percent of Young's fundraising -- still not a staggering amount, but enough to make BP contributions to Young far, far more significant than BP contributions to Obama.

more...

http://mediamatters.org/blog/201005060041

What was it about "repeating lies"?

gets a significant portion of his contributions from PACs. In fact, most of his money from oil and gas comes directly from PACs.

for my contributions to the Obama campaign. There were quite a few of us. Not really worried about this, though. People genuinely feel that this president is a man of integrity. Only took him a few hours to come out and tell us that BP would be shouldering the burden of the cleanup.

Let's dig into every one of our congress critters donations, I bet we'd all be surprised at what we find.

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"Sad to see that DU has become a place where bribery and corruption are defended with vigor."

What the hell are you talking about? Who are you claiming was bribed and is being defended?

What's sad, actually pathetic, is people throwing around lame accusations after Media Matters clearly shows that the Politico story is hogwash.

dirty? I am neither corrupt nor was I bribed, and I'm sure the individuals from BP who freely contributed aren't either. You're way off base.

this $77K in contributions from BP employees has clearly controlled Obama's decisions in this matter. He is clearly bought and paid for.

because they know there are those who will scarf it up like so many hungry vultures.

Thank goodness we have Eric Boehlert and Michael Scherer and reporters like them who are interested in the facts and not sensationalizing for the easily fooled.

MMFA's criticism is that it doesn't show the money in context of total contributions.

But it fails to acknowledge that the article quotes a White House spokesman making exactly that point.



If you're going to criticize the article on a certain basis, you can't just ignore a paragraph that undermines the point you're making. You have to acknowledge it and qualify the criticism.

And myself, I think MediaMatters is the best thing out there. In better times, I gave money to them. They have changed everything. Really, I can't emphasize enough how good MMFA is. I listen to RW radio and they hate MMFA. They are afraid of MMFA. They change what they say because they know MMFA is paying attention.

Here is how they introduced the quote you cited: "An Obama spokesman rejected the notion that the president took big oil money."

That's quite unique, even here at DU!

I think Politico often sucks, and I came to that conclusion mostly because of MMFA's excellent work.

Because $71,000 out of $750,000,000 in two years of campaigning is not a story.
The fact that McCain took public fund, and so he couldn't accept contribution
for the duration of the general election further skews the numbers....which in
accounting terms, based on the grand total contributions, would be considered
as literally immaterial.