A thought about exit polls

One theme keeps emerging in the current discourse on exit polls. The media keep insisting that the public should draw no conclusions from them. They are not meant to provide an indication of who will win, or to judge the legitimacy of the election. They are not meant to be compared against the actual vote count. They are not presented as scientific surveys. In short, they have no actual meaning at all, and the public should in no way react to them. From the media's perspective, judging from all the articles I've read this week, exit polls exist solely to allow newscasters the option of "calling" a state for a particular candidate. They are for newscasters, not for the public. If this claim is true, does it not mean that exit polls are a form of fake news? If the information in them is not real, what is it? Are the media now admitting that exit polls are presented as a facade of information? Perhaps they are meant to trick voters into thinking that what they read and hear is news (facts), when in fact it is a performance solely designed to steer the public's eyes toward advertisements. Is that what an exit poll is for? Eye candy for advertisers? Maybe this is the real story that the mainstream media don't want to be exposed. Maybe the exit polls are a sham, and the bloggers have now discovered it. That is why the media must dismiss the bloggers. Bloggers are, paradoxically, nothing more than the general public. Bloggers are thus their very viewing audience. The "blogosphere rumor-mill" is the media's worst nightmare, because it demonstrates that the audience has caught on to the half-assed sham that is the associated press. "Rumor-mill". There's another issue. The blogosphere can never be a rumor mill, and here's why. A blog post repeats something seen on another site somewhere. Typically, the blog post also links to the site itself. Rumor mills delete and distort information as they propagate. But blogs actually add and organize information as they go, and every reader is directly connected to the source. The rumor-mill is an important concept to me, because I have in the past done some analysis on the editorial processes of the news media (especially newspapers). Traditional media is, in fact, a form of rumor-mill. The article is isolated from its sources through anonymity, processed through the unique perspective of the author, and then filtered by the influence of various editors and perhaps financiers. All of this filtering only distorts the information. By linking directly to the sources (as much as possible), and by combining and organizing relevant links with analysis and commentary, blogs can without a doubt provide a superior reporting of the news. For the mainstream media to call the blogosphere a "rumor-mill" is some form of neurotic projection of self-doubt.