POYNTER DROPS THE BALL: This article by Steve Outing takes blogs to task for publishing exit polls:

Other bloggers also published early exit-poll numbers, including: The Drudge Report (as he did in 2000), The Daily Kos, MyDD, Atrios, Instapundit, and PowerLine.

Er, except that InstaPundit, at least, didn’t. (In fact, I pooh-poohed the exit polls.) Perhaps Outing was confused by this post, which reported: “On the other hand, exit-polling suggests a sudden Bernstein surge in Virginia. . . .” But there were no “numbers” and if Outing had followed the link, he would have seen that the “exit poll” in question was David Bernstein’s own blog entry saying that he had put himself down as a write-in candidate.

If Outing wants to call blogs “loose cannons,” perhaps he should try being a bit more careful to tie things down himself.

UPDATE: The error has been corrected, and the correction noted. Good job.

Some people wonder if I think it’s wrong to post exit poll results. Not really. I didn’t post ’em because I figured everyone had already seen them on Drudge. And the only comment I had was the one with the Mystery Pollster link, above, that I didn’t trust them. The good news is that as the exit polls continue to be wrong, releasing them makes less of a difference!