The case of the missing polls
Salon's Eric Boehlert asks, why have news outlets from Fox to the Washington Post, from ABC News to the New York Times, been ignoring the results of their own polls on the subject of Terri Schiavo?
It is as baffling to me as it is to Boehlert. But it is important, because by assigning the results to the proverbial dustbin of history, these news organizations are ignoring what must be concluded from the polls -- that many, many Congressional Republicans are far outside the mainstream of American public opinion. In many cases, whether because of pandering or fervent belief, they are far to the right of their own "base" on subjects pertaining to one's privacy and family matters.
In the rare case where someone from the right has ventured to discuss the poll results, they have tried to downplay the significance with the usual suspect: bias. The Volokh Conspiracy's Orin Kerr is being downright disingenuous when he claims that the ABC News poll results highlighted yesterday were driven by biased and "leading questions." Anytime someone doesn't like the results of a poll, they can always make such a claim. And I would agree that it is a dangerous thing to base public policy on polls for that very reason. But in this case, the poll respondents would have to be living in a media-free utopia to not be intimately aware of the sad particulars of this case. They weren't replying to "biased" or "leading" questions. They were speaking about something they'd actually given a lot of thought to as it pertains to their own lives and the lives of their loved ones.
It is as baffling to me as it is to Boehlert. But it is important, because by assigning the results to the proverbial dustbin of history, these news organizations are ignoring what must be concluded from the polls -- that many, many Congressional Republicans are far outside the mainstream of American public opinion. In many cases, whether because of pandering or fervent belief, they are far to the right of their own "base" on subjects pertaining to one's privacy and family matters.
The Schiavo episode highlights not only how far to the right the GOP-controlled Congress has lunged -- a 2003 Fox News poll found just 2 percent of Americans think the government should decide this type of right-to-die issue -- but also how paralyzed the mainstream press has become in pointing out the obvious: that the GOP leadership often operates well outside the mainstream of America. The press's timidity is important because publicizing the poll results might extend the debate from one that focuses exclusively on a complicated moral and ethical dilemma to one that also examines just how far a radical and powerful group of religious conservatives are willing to go to push their political beliefs on the public.
In the rare case where someone from the right has ventured to discuss the poll results, they have tried to downplay the significance with the usual suspect: bias. The Volokh Conspiracy's Orin Kerr is being downright disingenuous when he claims that the ABC News poll results highlighted yesterday were driven by biased and "leading questions." Anytime someone doesn't like the results of a poll, they can always make such a claim. And I would agree that it is a dangerous thing to base public policy on polls for that very reason. But in this case, the poll respondents would have to be living in a media-free utopia to not be intimately aware of the sad particulars of this case. They weren't replying to "biased" or "leading" questions. They were speaking about something they'd actually given a lot of thought to as it pertains to their own lives and the lives of their loved ones.
posted by John at 9:04 AM
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