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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sedohr Nod who wrote (689487)	7/2/2005 10:45:39 AM
From: Emile Vidrine	Respond to of 769667

How the Jewish controlled media uses polling language to distort news and public opinion: Bernard Goldberg isn’t the only one out with a book documenting the media’s bias. Matt Robinson, a former editorial writer for Investor’s Business Daily who is now the Managing Editor of Human Events, has recently penned Mobocracy: How The Media's Obsession With Polling Twists the News, Alters Elections, and Undermines Democracy. The February 25 Human Events, "the national conservative weekly," carried a review of the book by Robert D. Novak. Though the review is not posted on the Human Events Web page (http://www.humaneventsonline.com), I was able to obtain the text of Novak’s review. An excerpt: Early in 2001, a Newsweek national poll asked: "Do you think Congress should approve Bush's choice of John Ashcroft for attorney general, or reject Ashcroft as too far to the right on issues like abortion, drugs and gun control to be an effective attorney general?" Only 37% of the sample said yes, while 41% were against confirmation. "With that kind of wording," writes Matthew Robinson, "it's a wonder only 41% opposed Ashcroft." Those distorted poll results were enough for other media outlets, picking up the Newsweek survey, to pronounce President Bush's nominee for attorney general an unpopular choice and give Ashcroft's Senate opponents political cover to vote against his confirmation. That technique is part of the process described by Robinson in Mobocracy. Biased wording of questions combines with a distorted polling sample to undermine the entire democratic process. "At the same time that polling has metastasized," he writes, "voter disconnect has surged" -- as evidenced by low voter turnout and distrust of government. "The likely effect of sample after sample will be to drain the health and vitality of the nation as Americans tune out." Mobocracy is a serious, meticulously researched account of the causal relationship between polls and the decline of what used to be known as republican virtue. Robinson cites The Federalist Papers, especially James Madison, to demonstrate what the Founding Fathers conceived as the new nation's politics, compared to how the "proliferation of polls" has produced an "age of spin."... The big liberal news media poll incessantly, not just during elections. "In the wake of an airline crash, school shooting or similar tragedy," Robinson writes, "polling is now one of the hallmarks of the media feeding frenzy. In this context, polls make public opinion as much as they observe it." The supposedly "detached and objective" pollster "becomes part of the political struggle." The wording of the poll controls the outcome. A CBS News-New York Times poll used negative wording in asking whether parents should "get tax-funded vouchers they can use to help pay for tuition for their children to attend private or religious schools instead of public schools." Nevertheless, 49% of voters said yes -- "amazingly," comments Robinson. When the poll changed the wording to whether parents should "get tax-funded vouchers even if that means public schools would receive less money," support falls to 33%. If changing what is asked can transform the outcome, changing who is asked even more definitively distorts the result. Thus, using the answers to poll takers by all "registered" voters rather than employing the more expensive technique of limiting results to "likely" voters tilts the results to the left. With legitimate voters increasingly reluctant to respond to poll questions, the people sampled are "grossly ignorant and even apathetic." People who don't bother to vote are enfranchised in the pollster's "mob." Robinson sees the polls yielding "half-baked opinions based on little more than momentary impressions." The propensity for manipulation was never greater than in the flawed debate over the impeachment of President Bill Clinton when he survived "almost solely due to his support in public opinion polls." What is to be done? Robinson offers a laundry list of changes: End overnight polls, which are notoriously unreliable. Question only "likely" voters in polls. Use samples with a minimum of 1,000 voters. Release all information about surveys, including the exact wording of questions. Draft questions that precisely define terms (such as "voucher" in a school choice survey). Don't count on any of the Robinson reforms being implemented. Even if they were, a poll would still be a poll. "Polls are not and can never be a surrogate for debate," Robinson writes. Indeed, Matthew Robinson sees the republican ideal as envisioned by James Madison undermined by the sophisticated appeal to the "mob" through the symbiotic relationship between politicians, the media and pollsters: "The noblest expression of liberty and self-rule isn't found in the questions written by a pollster working in New York for a newspaper story about a Washington controversy and then tested on a busy and uninformed citizen. Liberty values action and rewards individual decisions in every life where the margin of error is contained by personal responsibility and government is limited to allow the full expression of every belief and private opinion." END of Excerpt For a bio of Robinson: humaneventsonline.com Robinson’s book is published by Prima, which summarizes it on their Web site: primapublishing.com You can buy Robinson’s book online via Amazon.com, which pairs it with Goldberg’s book at a discounted price: amazon.com