Sunday, April 10, 2005

Stop worrying about polls

Polls are unreliable and are a favorite tool of the MSM/DNC. Polls have their own category (#4) on the bias list. We must treat them as unreliable, as I advised after cataloging the (incomplete) list of media outrages of the election of 2004.

We should stick to this policy even when the polls operate in our favor. Polls act as self-fulfilling prophecies when they favor leftist positions. But when they favor American positions, there often is another shoe that will drop. The polls showing Bush with a huge lead in early September acted only as a prelude to later polls that showed Kerry as the comeback kid - thus providing needed momentum to Kerry as he went into election day. Conservatives wasted much time speculating as to the accuracy of those polls and the motivation behind the MSM/DNC. [One good thing that those early September polls (and related anti-Kerry news) accomplished was to force CBS into running its Bush/National Guard/fake memo story on September 8th instead of October 31st - as they tried to rescue Kerry's failing candidacy.]

We must be skeptical when the MSM/DNC allows a pro-conservative or other pro-American poll result to be made public. While we should discuss such polls - especially if they contradict other MSM/DNC polls - we must add a caveat to every poll discussion that polls are usually an unreliable tool of MSM/DNC propoganda. We can't credibly attack polls that favor MSM/DNC positions if we are quick to accept polls that favor conservatives.
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Monday update.

Powerline tries to explain away current poll numbers. The Powerline post is fine, but would be much better if it acknowledged the historical tendency of polls to serve an MSM/DNC purpose.

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