Hillbuzz is the right wing website leading the charge to get Bristol Palin, who can’t dance a lick, voted as the best celebrity dancer on TV’s “Dancing With The Stars” because, illogically enough, the site’s operators like her mother. Makes sense to me! Actually, it only makes sense in that I am familiar with how self-absorbed political fanatics on the Right and Left think, which is often inherently unethical. In this case, Hillbuzz thinks it’s reasonable to louse up the fun of a dancing competition and turn it into an expression of Tea Party power.
I’ve written a lot on the ethics of intentionally skewing online polls and competitions. It’s not earth shattering stuff, but it is wrong and mean-spirited and selfish the same way vandalism and releasing web viruses are. These are people who enjoy spoiling what other people enjoy just because they can. In a word, yechh.
The classic example of this illness is the American Idol attack site, Votefortheworst.com. Hillbuzz isn’t as bad, because there is little tangible benefit from winning “Dancing,” but the ethics breaches are the same.
Hillbuzz proves its qualifications in a post that stands as a classic in the rationalizations pantheon, using “Everybody does it”, “they started it” and “this isn’t the worst thing” like a virtuoso—the unmistakable sign of someone who is ethically obtuse and proud of it. I’ll leave you with a sample; rationalizations of unethical conduct seldom get more obnoxiously smug than this:
“…I think Sally Quinn from some newspaper nobody reads anymore also isn’t fond of me, and she’s the woman who deliberately planned some wedding to conflict with some other wedding, and made all sorts of people mad about that, which is amusing in itself. I will laugh and laugh at all of these fools on the Left for years. Today’s going to be the last day of revving them all up…and then the fun is really going to begin because all of these people are on record howling about how unfair it is that Bristol Palin had an army dialing and voting for her…but none of these people say boo about Democrats having an army of ACORN, SEIU, Black Panthers, and Organizing for America thugs at their disposal in every election…committing voter fraud at the ballot box to tip elections to Democrats. There is just such an immense bounty of hypocrisy in all of this…and almost every single major TV show, news program, newspaper, and political website went on wild tangents howling about Dancing with the Stars…and can now be questioned why similar howling is never applied to voter fraud in actual elections…”
Yup, you got that right: HillBuzz is stuffing ballots to get the worst dancer elected to combat Democratic voter fraud.
Ethics Alarms 
Dear Jack: It seems to me that it was the leftist pundits that first tied political significance onto Sarah Palin’s daughter being on DWTS. Personally, I never watch the show and hate dancing besides! Therefore, I wouldn’t even attempt to judge who’s hot and who’s not. Nor would I try something so underhanded as to attack a political personage through such a medium. Others would, though, and have… spurred on by their desperate fear and hate of Governor Palin’s influence. And if you don’t answer them back, you effectively concede the point.
Well, there was obviously political significance to the choice of her as a contestant, and it’s silly now for both Bristol and the producer to pretend that this wasn’t supposed to happen. Nobody’s voting against her because she’s a Palin, since anyone with eyes should vote against her on the basis of artistic integrity. This ain’t a primary, and the only ones trying to make it one are the Palin fans…can’t fairly lay this off on the Democrats. And the voter fraud excuse is just too dumb.
Oh, please — just let her Win. Vote for her, do! Impediments placed in the path of wannabe celebrities just offer stepping-stones to a higher level. Ignore them and they shrivel up and blow away. No sponsors. That’s the way it works.
But, just for kicks, looked up how-to-vote-for-DWTesses: Did you know only AT&T customers could text their choices (same for Idol)? According to the post above, is AT&T, then, riddled with wildly-thumbing Bristol-hatin’ (dance-lovin’) Democrats?
I hear Jennnifer Grey’s old nose voted hundreds of times…
I can see the lack of ethics in intentionally voting for the worst of something, but what’s wrong with destroying an on-line poll by getting more people with similar beliefs to vote in it?
In the best case, on line polls are journalists’ response to controversy. “I know one of these side is right and one is wrong, but I’m not going to take a stand. Instead, I’m going to let you all make up your mind.” That’s straight dereliction of duty. They deserve to have their poll crashed and shown that it’s worthless. There’s a reason Nate Silver (of Baseball Prospectus fame) doesn’t include Zogby in his 538.com political polling averages.
In the worst case, a poll is put up to push a certain view, and then trumpet the results (or the best case poll’s results are trumpeted as having meaning). In this case, there is willful abstention from ethics from the poller. The crashers are simply showing that the poll is worthless and can’t be used as evidence for anything.
How is the above anything like releasing a web virus or vandalism. What is mean-spirited, wrong, or selfish? Since it appears you’ve been over this, can you point me to some pretty posts that explain your beliefs well, or should I dig though the archives and hopefully not quote-mine you to horribly?
I think the link to Votefortheworst in the article. I bet you thought that was actually a link to the website! I worried about that. I think I’ll fix it.
If you think a poll is worthless, don’t read it, use it or participate in it. Spoiling it by skewing the results is, in fact, a kind of vandalism. Similarly, don’t destroy a CD you don’t like, or deface it. Don’t listen to it.
I don’t get it. So, you’re saying that we should allow people to make up stuff without calling them on it?
A better parallel to poll crashing would be if someone invited everyone to come to an event and share their opinion, the crashers found 10,000 friends to come and share their opinion, and then the inviter got upset with that result. I don’t see any destruction occurring. The crashers aren’t taking down the site, they’re just bringing more people from their side in.
I don’t get the question. All polls are just measured opinions…they only measure what people think, not facts. Sure, when a poll is BS, say so. Don’t set out to sabotage the poll to make it even more worthless than it is. People have a right to know whether, as a typical TMZ poll would ask, whether idiots silly enough to participate in such a poll would rather have sex with the Happy Days mom or the Brady Bunch mom. Setting out to make sure the poll is fixed, one way or the other, is unethical. Is it a big deal? No. Fixing DWTS is worse, because people really care about the integrity of the competition, and fixing “Idol” is worse still, because careers are at stake.