Clarification/Follow-up by Itsdb on 03/13/06 9:56 pm:
Check this out Elliot...

MOST SAY IRAQ WAR HAS AIDED U.S. SECURITY AND AGREE WITH NSA SURVEILLANCE OF TERRORISTS, BUT ABC WON’T SAY SO ON TELEVISION

ABC’S SELECTIVE REPORTING OF LATEST “BAD NEWS FOR BUSH” POLL

Just a week after ABC, NBC, MSNBC and CNN put aside their competitive instincts and heavily touted a CBS News poll showing the President with an “all-time low” approval rating (after the pollsters contacted many Democrats and relatively few Republicans), ABC is showing a different kind of polling bias: Trumpeting just the findings that assist the administration’s liberal critics.

Monday’s World News Tonight and Tuesday’s Good Morning America both headlined with how 80 percent pessimistically believe “civil war” is likely in Iraq. But isn’t an opinion ABC has been pushing on viewers? On February 24, Good Morning America’s Charles Gibson fretted about “grave concerns about civil war,” and World News Tonight co-anchor Elizabeth Vargas insisting on March 1 that Iraq was “dangerously close to civil war.”

As for President Bush’s approval rating, ABC found it essentially unchanged since its last poll in January (41% approval now, 42% approval back then). So on last night’s World News Tonight, Vargas and George Stephanopoulos just ignored that number, seven points higher than the 34% “all-time low” in the CBS poll that every network embraced last week.

On this morning’s Good Morning America, however, co-host Robin Roberts claimed that ABC’s new poll had found “President Bush’s job approval rating has sunk to a new career low.” But isn’t he much more popular than ABC said he was last week?

Some of what ABC News didn’t tell TV viewers: Their poll found a majority (54%) said it was okay that the National Security Agency is “secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails between some people in the United States and other countries, without first getting court approval to do so.” Didn’t ABC tout that as a major scandal?

And, according to ABC’s poll, half of the public (50%) agrees that “the war with Iraq has contributed to the long-term security of the United States,” vs. 48% who say it has not. And, 62% said they favored how after 9/11 “FBI was given additional authority in areas like surveillance, wiretaps and obtaining records in terrorism investigations.”

But you didn’t hear that news if you watched ABC last night or this morning.

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Hey, if your own poll doesn't support your cause just find one that does.

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Now check this out...

Liberal Networks Show Their Bias By Pouncing On CBS Poll Based On A Skewed Anti-Bush Sample

TV Tries To Sink Bush
With Weighted Poll

No one would claim right now that President Bush fits the adjective "popular." But the hubbub this week over the "record low" approval ratings CBS News discovered for President Bush raises an important question: which media-outlet polls are trusted and which are not?

If the pollsters for Fox News Channel are ignored, then should the pollsters for CBS, the network where Dan Rather had to resign his anchor chair for sloppy Bush-bashing journalism, be treated as trustworthy and nonpartisan?

A glance at a roundup of presidential approval rating polls shows that the grand canyon between Bush's approval and disapproval ratings of 25 percent (34 to 59) is far outside the usual margin. An early February Fox News-Opinion Dynamics poll had a gap of only three percent (44 percent approve, 47 percent disapprove). No one noticed. The other media-elite polls placed the gap in the mid-teens: ABC (14), NBC (15), CNN (17), AP (17), and Time (14). FNC's brand-new poll has the gap up to 15 points, 39 to 54.

If these approval-rating polls were like Olympic judges, wouldn't the media throw out the high mark and the low mark? Not if you're the "mainstream" media. Instead, they championed the "record low" CBS number as the definitive current Bush approval rating. CBS naturally hyped the poll on its evening and morning shows. ABC promoted it on Tuesday's Good Morning America. NBC's Today promoted it twice Tuesday in news reports and once in a Matt Lauer interview with Chris Matthews on Wednesday. (Katie Couric also mentioned it without citing CBS by name.) None of those reports came close to questioning the poll's internals, that featured more Democrats than Republicans.

As the blogosphere quickly discovered from CBS's online report, CBS "weighted" its sample to reflect an ideal cross-section of American adults. They adjusted the number of self-described Republicans up to 28 percent and Democrats down to 37 percent, and independents with the rest. That's hardly the exit-poll breakdown the networks found on Election Day 2004 (37 percent GOP, 37 percent Democrat, 26 percent independent).

The question for these networks: did the last ten CBS polls get any fraction of the publicity from competitors as this one drew?

The cable networks also publicized the CBS poll. Unsurprisingly, on MSNBC, both Chris Matthews on Hardball and Keith Olbermann on Countdown led off their evening shows with the bad news for Bush.

CNN liked the poll so much they began mentioning it at 9 PM on Monday night, when Larry King asked comic Jon Stewart for his reaction. On Tuesday, CNN promoted CBS's Bush poll in these PM hours: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 10. OnThe Situation Room at 4 PM, blogs reporter Jacki Schechner offered one mention that conservatives complained the poll's internals were skewed. That didn't stop the CBS poll from leading Paula Zahn Now at 8.

Fox News discussed the poll's biased sample both on Tuesday's Special Report with Brit Hume and Wednesday's Fox and Friends.

Pollster Bob Moran wondered on "The Corner" blog of National Review Online: "Why is the sample so Democrat? One reason may be because almost every question bangs the President and I would guess that the hang ups they get are vastly more Republican than Democrat. Think about it. Why would a Republican sit on the phone and answer loaded anti-Bush questions for 15 minutes?"

Is CBS really the gold standard for polling data? One critic on the CBS Public Eye blog suggested, "Let's see CBS conduct a poll of CBS's approval rating. That should give a good indication of the validity of any of CBS's other polls, no matter how they are weighted." — Tim Graham

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Yeah, those polls are quite meaningful aren't they?

Steve

Clarification/Follow-up by ETWolverine on 03/14/06 3:03 pm:
Steve,

I don't watch specific polls. I watch polling TRENDS, because I think that can give a better idea of what the country is thinking than any single poll. Any single result can be out of the norm and give a hugly inaccurate impression. But when they are all taken together (regardless of the biases within the polls themselves), a much more accurate picture can be seen. That is why I don't generally post the results of one specific poll, but rather the results of several months worth. Taken in that light, I think the polls are meaningful.

Elliot

Clarification/Follow-up by Itsdb on 03/14/06 3:10 pm:
For those who actually pay attention and dig deeper, yes. But that's not what the public gets.

Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 03/14/06 3:36 pm:
The basis of most Jewish holidays: They attacked us, we won, let's eat.

I see a parallel today with the threats of the modern Persian empire ... Ahmadinejad being Haman .....maybe for today he will be known as Hamandinajad .