Drudge and Polling

For the third time, the good people over at fivethirtyeight.com are coming down on Drudge for cherry-picking the polls he features on his frontpage. I'm stealing their screenshot (from here) since it's so difficult to access the past content of Drudge.

Previously, 538 critiqued Drudge for featuring an Internet-based poll that was neither timely (it was two weeks old) nor meant for horse race coverage. Before that, Drudge used its BREAKING NEWS font to highlight a poll that seemed to put the candidates only two points apart, despite the following analysis from 538:

Slow news day, Matt? If this is a two-point race right now, I'll eat Drudge's fedora. None of the dozen or so other polls that were in the field this week shows a race that close. Nor do either of the alternate versions of Gallup's model, including the so-called Likely Voters II model that I find most credible. (Drudge, of course, had no interest in featuring the Zogby poll, as he had for the past several of days on his site, but which today showed Obama gaining ground.)