Say what you will about Dan Rather’s fall from grace, but say this as well: In his heyday Dan said he did not trust polls. Logically, he did not trust pollsters either.
Call it a paraphrase if you must, but I call it an update:
Having updated Mark Twain, or whoever said it first, I must confess: I consider a poll the word of God whenever it echoes my opinion.
So why replace the word statistics with the word polls since poll results are expressed as statistics? One answer is that the word statistic has long been associated with lying, while the word poll has been scrubbed clean.
Another answer is that mass communications brought big money to polling. Big money requires a squeaky-clean image especially in politics; whereas, manipulating statistics for a limited audience in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not pay that well.
Radio and motion pictures constituted mass communications before television. With that in mind, I believe that the 1947 movie Magic Town starring James Stewart was an important advance for poll-takers. Magic Town reached a large audience; convincing many that opinion-polling was reputable. Opinion-polling was Stewart’s failing business in the movie. (Imagine naming a business Opinion-Statistic)!
Note that professional polling organizations never use “Opinion” in their titles. It’s the Gallup Poll, the Quinnipiac Poll, the CBS Poll, the FOX News Poll, and so on.
The bright light of reality exposing a pollster always gives pleasure. Happily, Frank Luntz has been outed by C. Edmund Wright over at the American Thinker:
I cannot add to Wright’s exposé except to say that all pollsters are media bottom-feeders. News is such a farce the people who pay the salaries ordered talking heads to treat pollsters as legitimate sources of “news.” Ditto print journalism.
I don’t surf into the liberal networks; so I can only imagine what their pollsters are promoting. I do know that pollsters abound on the FOXY Network. None more than Luntz who gets a lot of face time on Sean Hannity’s show. That makes me think Luntz’s office is located deep in the bowels of FOX News headquarters.
Polls and propaganda are inseparable. The poll itself becomes a news story. The information a survey gathers is propaganda designed to manipulate the public. At the very least pollsters engage in newspeak.
Even if a pollster is honest he can be manipulated by politicians trying to increase their favorable ratings by saying things that appeals to their base. Example: Hussein’s numbers start slipping so he goes on television and talks about hope and change. Bingo! A poll is taken showing that his numbers inch up a point or two for a few days.
Add media bias to reporting poll numbers as news and you have propaganda in its purest form. If the media did not report poll results the polling industry would shrink considerably. There would still be internal polls that the public never sees anyway, but the manipulation factor would be gone.
Political polls are basically scorecards telling everybody which idea is leading on the day the poll is taken. Popularity polls tell us the day to day score on presidents. Polls often report the president’s job approval number in addition to how much the public likes or dislikes him. Once in a while the public gets a running score on a minor league player like the speaker of the house.
Polls done on institutions like Congress most often use the terms approve or disapprove since Congress is never popular. The word “rating” qualifies the terms favorable and unfavorable although I’ve never been certain how approve and disapprove differs from favorable and unfavorable?
Surveying public opinion, often called polling, is a huge business in America. Everything from public figures to institutions to ideas gets polled these days. I have a hunch that the growth of the polling industry is bound up with selling democracy. Asking people what they think makes them believe they have a say in government.
Since polls have become so prominent in politicks it’s time to take a poll on democracy. Asking average Americans would be a waste of time. Big government advocates would praise democracy; champions of limited government would oppose democracy; wimps and idiots would say use the best of both. That would bring us back to liberal versus conservative. So I suggest that everybody who is interested in this topic conduct their own survey; a scorecard based on the observations of all of the great political thinkers in history.
The survey I suggest is easy to do. There are numerous websites listing quotations about democracy. You can get started with the disc containing your computer dictionary. Those discs usually include a book of quotations. Should you get into the survey, I think you’ll be surprised by the political thinkers who disapproved of democracy as well as the few who thought democracy was the greatest invention since the wheel. And there are plenty of books available for anyone who wants to go deeper than quotes. One such tome, Politics, by Aristotle might have been talking about the XVII Amendment:
Just to be clear, I am not suggesting a consensus in the same way that climate change hustlers claimed scientific truth because a consensus of like-minded scientists agreed on the best route to the public trough. Unlike science, there are no absolutes in politicks. I am simply trying to show that many more political thinkers disapproved of democracy than approved. Put it this way: I trust America’s Founding Fathers who had no use for democracy more than I trust Mikhail Gorbachev:
Here are the links to the two fabulous articles I quoted:
Call it a paraphrase if you must, but I call it an update:
Having updated Mark Twain, or whoever said it first, I must confess: I consider a poll the word of God whenever it echoes my opinion.
So why replace the word statistics with the word polls since poll results are expressed as statistics? One answer is that the word statistic has long been associated with lying, while the word poll has been scrubbed clean.
Another answer is that mass communications brought big money to polling. Big money requires a squeaky-clean image especially in politics; whereas, manipulating statistics for a limited audience in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not pay that well.
Radio and motion pictures constituted mass communications before television. With that in mind, I believe that the 1947 movie Magic Town starring James Stewart was an important advance for poll-takers. Magic Town reached a large audience; convincing many that opinion-polling was reputable. Opinion-polling was Stewart’s failing business in the movie. (Imagine naming a business Opinion-Statistic)!
Note that professional polling organizations never use “Opinion” in their titles. It’s the Gallup Poll, the Quinnipiac Poll, the CBS Poll, the FOX News Poll, and so on.
The bright light of reality exposing a pollster always gives pleasure. Happily, Frank Luntz has been outed by C. Edmund Wright over at the American Thinker:
I cannot add to Wright’s exposé except to say that all pollsters are media bottom-feeders. News is such a farce the people who pay the salaries ordered talking heads to treat pollsters as legitimate sources of “news.” Ditto print journalism.
I don’t surf into the liberal networks; so I can only imagine what their pollsters are promoting. I do know that pollsters abound on the FOXY Network. None more than Luntz who gets a lot of face time on Sean Hannity’s show. That makes me think Luntz’s office is located deep in the bowels of FOX News headquarters.
Polls and propaganda are inseparable. The poll itself becomes a news story. The information a survey gathers is propaganda designed to manipulate the public. At the very least pollsters engage in newspeak.
Even if a pollster is honest he can be manipulated by politicians trying to increase their favorable ratings by saying things that appeals to their base. Example: Hussein’s numbers start slipping so he goes on television and talks about hope and change. Bingo! A poll is taken showing that his numbers inch up a point or two for a few days.
Add media bias to reporting poll numbers as news and you have propaganda in its purest form. If the media did not report poll results the polling industry would shrink considerably. There would still be internal polls that the public never sees anyway, but the manipulation factor would be gone.
Political polls are basically scorecards telling everybody which idea is leading on the day the poll is taken. Popularity polls tell us the day to day score on presidents. Polls often report the president’s job approval number in addition to how much the public likes or dislikes him. Once in a while the public gets a running score on a minor league player like the speaker of the house.
Polls done on institutions like Congress most often use the terms approve or disapprove since Congress is never popular. The word “rating” qualifies the terms favorable and unfavorable although I’ve never been certain how approve and disapprove differs from favorable and unfavorable?
Surveying public opinion, often called polling, is a huge business in America. Everything from public figures to institutions to ideas gets polled these days. I have a hunch that the growth of the polling industry is bound up with selling democracy. Asking people what they think makes them believe they have a say in government.
Since polls have become so prominent in politicks it’s time to take a poll on democracy. Asking average Americans would be a waste of time. Big government advocates would praise democracy; champions of limited government would oppose democracy; wimps and idiots would say use the best of both. That would bring us back to liberal versus conservative. So I suggest that everybody who is interested in this topic conduct their own survey; a scorecard based on the observations of all of the great political thinkers in history.
The survey I suggest is easy to do. There are numerous websites listing quotations about democracy. You can get started with the disc containing your computer dictionary. Those discs usually include a book of quotations. Should you get into the survey, I think you’ll be surprised by the political thinkers who disapproved of democracy as well as the few who thought democracy was the greatest invention since the wheel. And there are plenty of books available for anyone who wants to go deeper than quotes. One such tome, Politics, by Aristotle might have been talking about the XVII Amendment:
Just to be clear, I am not suggesting a consensus in the same way that climate change hustlers claimed scientific truth because a consensus of like-minded scientists agreed on the best route to the public trough. Unlike science, there are no absolutes in politicks. I am simply trying to show that many more political thinkers disapproved of democracy than approved. Put it this way: I trust America’s Founding Fathers who had no use for democracy more than I trust Mikhail Gorbachev:
Here are the links to the two fabulous articles I quoted:
Last edited:
