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BIASED TV NEWS AND THE DAILY NEWSPAPERS' POLITICAL POLLS

These days it seems every news gathering operation has a political agenda. If a TV news network and/or a major daily newspaper or any other polling enterprise chooses to skew the results of a poll it can easily do so. 

For example, if a poll's result is to come up with a negative view of the President's job performance pollster management can do so by simply averaging in the results of all those polled who said they would rate the President's job performance as "fair". This way those in charge of the polling results can add in all the "unfavorable" responses with all the "fair" responses and you oftentimes will come up with an unfavorable rating on the poll question of rating the President's job performance. Few people EVER question how poll results are obtained!

Of course, those who dispense the poll results to the public will likely use the information to their advantage and not ever tell the naive public how they came up with the poll results. In fact, if anyone ever did thoroughly investigate and expose how poll results were achieved the public would likely not believe the polls anymore especially when they involve political polling questions. 

Remember, those out of power want to regain power. Those in power want to maintain power and the voters are the sheep being herded one way or another by the sophists who wield sophisticated arguments and created news stories designed to win voters over to their side of an issue or election at all costs by any unethical means necessary to achieve the desired end! In other words, WIN no matter if you have to lie, cheat and steal!

The most unreliable, invalid scientific instrument available to researchers is the use of the survey which includes polls because survey instruments have so many variables that cannot be controlled and "controls" are what makes a scientific instrument valid or invalid, reliable or unreliable.

Another bias in political polling procedures that the public is too often unaware of is when the pollsters poll more liberals than conservatives, more Democrats than Republicans and vice versa. If they really wanted an accurate poll they would ALWAYS ask close to the same number of Democrats and Republicans the poll questions but they too often interview more of one group than the other. 

Of course, they try and offset the results by saying the poll results may be "off" or in error either way by up to 9% which supposedly fairly represents the political group which was not fairly represented in the poll. However, any poll being "off" by anything over 3% is not considered to be a scientific poll by standards upheld in the past as the standard rate of error!

SUPPLEMENTAL SOURCE: POLITICAL ANALYST, DICK MORRIS 2/28/06
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