Media polls are bullshit

Thursday, April 19, 2018

When you see a poll done by CNN or The Washington Post, run like hell.

Media organizations doing their own polls, as opposed to allowing real professional to conduct them, are generally a form of political terrorism.

The media group is most likely trying to drive candidates out of a political contest (mostly aimed at the GOP) or trying to drive down popular opinion through a bogus testing of sample voters.

This is part of media’s ability to create news. They make up the questions they know will get a reaction, and then go out and ask people, and then come back and report on it as if this is some objective slice of life, when it was merely media making news they want to report.

Most media these days when it comes to the GOP or Donald Trump are deeply involved in making up their own news and reporting it as if it was real news.

Media and associated interest groups are well known for creating pseudo events such as the woman’s march or the student walkout to generate a sense that public opinion is strong on issues media is trying to sell.

Media creates events for the express purpose of being able to report them as news, even when reporters are perfectly aware that they are staged or give them the results they want.

Media polls are one of the most vicious and underhanded ways of manipulating public opinion and subtly attacking public figures or candidates media dislikes.

When media wants to make someone look bad, they create one of these polls, phrasing the questions and the explanations to make certain the poll numbers come out as they want.

Even legitimate polls provide superficial results, like a wine tasting in which media assumes much about people’s opinions with less than a sip.

Media polls usually distort the results by phrasing the questions to get a negative result. Pollsters have long known that you can manipulate the results by how you ask the questions and in which context you ask them.

These polls provide misinformation which are then reported as legitimate beliefs.

Except for the best pollsters, very few of the polls can tell you what the data actually means or whether the result have any validity.

They can alter the results by discriminating against specific groups, and so by asking only certain groups, achieve the result they need.

These polls allow media to make sweeping generations that deliberately mislead their audience.

But they have the worst effect on politicians and other public officials, who are forced to take them seriously because polls have another nasty impact on politicians and their campaigns.

This, of course, is the real aim of most media generated polls, to provide a skewed view of reality that will scare the hell out of a politician, a political staff and more importantly campaign contributors.

The results can chase away important professional campaign staff, who want to avoid a losing cause.

The polls also may damage small serious and better candidates from running in the first place.

These media polls have often affected the outcomes of primaries elections where they chase candidates out early in the game, limiting the field to savvier political people.

Some of the most prestigious and respected publications such as The New York Times fail when doing polls to conform to the standards set by the American Association for Public Opinion (AAFPO). One report showed the Times’ compliance with these standards at a dismal 25 percent.

CNN is probably worse. No telling what standards the Washington Post follows since it hardly abides to basic journalistic ethics in the first place.

You can’t always tell who is actually sponsoring the pool, or even who conducted it. Unless you’re lucky enough to actually take the survey, you can’t tell just how the questions are phrased, the exact wording, or how slanted the explanation leading to the questions are.

Many questions and explanations are framed in a way to elicit the response the pollster wants.

You don’t even know who was actually polled, whether they were straight, gay, white, black, men, women, or even the geographical location such as a primarily liberal or conservative part of the country.

It is almost impossible to know if a poll is slanted when it is reported about, and considering the viciousness of current liberal media, you can bet the poll was a push poll, meaning every aspect was created to build on a pre-determined result.

The thing to watch most is where these liberal media outlets focus their attention. Are they publishing polls in areas where they hope to create an upset against the GOP? Are they deliberately manufacturing polls that will chase candidates out, or create a public perception that the GOP candidate is weak or vulnerable when in reality they are not?