"When these polls show a slight lead of 5% in favor of the Republican, the real lead is probably 10%, "
Again, you did not show a consistent Republican or Democratic bias in studies on universities, in fact, I am not sure what you were addressing, racism in Montana?. This is one of the problems with you guys. I imagine you and your conservative friends and probably seen and repeated this "fact" many times in the RWNC, now you believe. It is indeed difficult to construct an unbias study so no study is perfect. Studies use numbers and can be measured. If you want to make that statement there is a lot of literature out there addressing flawed study construction and design.
I would be interested in seeing a well designed study on TV. Can you post a link? By it's nature a poll collected from a group of people that watch a certain show or TV program would insure the respondents were not random.
"No charge for the tutoring."
I had been impressed you at least put this much effort in to a reply, then you have to be a smart ass, and demonstrating how little you really know about studies.
I know as much about studies as anyone who has attended graduate school, and know enough to ignore them as being lame and ill-founded, when they are. You seem to place, IMO, an overestimation of the importance of studies to the point of not accepting anything to be valid or of value, unless coming from university study. I find that to be laughable, and on the verge of pathogenic, in revealing how suckered people are by university dogma/culture.
Obviously, your definition of what constitutes a "study" is vastly different than mine. This may seem a bit exaggerated for demonstrative purposes, but going back to the fish can swim illustration, I'm seeing the difference between your perception and mine, being where you would look for a study done by someone who you regard as prestigious, whereas I would go to a few of my local fishing piers and look down into the water on windless, clear water days, and observe the fish of various species, and that would be more than enough for my "study". Furthermore, I would question any study, done by anybody who did NOT look into the water (or an aquarium tank), and directly observe fish.
In summation, after more than 50 years since first attending college, and having heard about hundreds of studies, Like the Stephens-Davidowitz study, I'm not impressed by the overall reliability of university or think tank or media studies, and I view them as being very suspect to be lacking, if not deliberate fraud. I see the studies of my eyes and ears, as at least as reliable as any formal studies, and in many cases much more so. With the use of formal studies as a political weapon, I'm even more suspicious of them, and I tend to look at possible motive factors among the "researchers", before even looking at what they have to say.
In general assessment, I would fairly comfortably say that university studies are among the least reliable sources of information in existence, due to how apt they are to conflict of interest, vested interest, and bias.