>I'm a fan of your Left Business Observer reports--I've heard you on
>KPFA for many years. I think your e-mail below is a bit officious
>and sensationalistic in its own right.
If you're familiar with my work, and even a "fan," then you should know that I'm obsessed with getting the numbers straight and facing things as they are instead of as we'd like them to be. I'm afraid Retropoll falls short on both counts. Your press release was spun at a very high RPM.
I sympathize with your efforts to investigate how what people "know" influences what they believe. But there are problems with the way you investigate this. By prefacing the opinion section with a number of factual questions (some of which are really matters of opinion too, but let's leave that aside), you may be biasing the results. The rigorous way to test that would be to do two polls, one with the "factual" questions and one without, and compare the results (though with sample sizes of 150 you couldn't do this too rigorously). You may be proving that if people are reminded (or informed for the first time) that RR sent Rumsfeld to shake hands with SH in 1984 that changes their opinions on the war and the president. Which is an interesting finding, but not one too relevant in a world where most people don't hear these things, and think and vote accordingly.
Do you tell people what the "correct" answers are before you ask the opinion questions?
Also, you make a big deal out of nonresponders, but concede pretty far down in your copy that you can't do anything about that either. Casual readers might conclude that you've got some magic way to correct for the problem when you don't.
>Your comments about what mainstream pollsters believe about
>non-responders misses our point. Of course they know it's a problem
>but they keep on spinning their margin of error message. Any good
>statistics professor will confirm that it's a ruse. It isn't a
>margin of error that makes any sense given the non-responder rate.
And if you've got a similar nonresponse rate, then you've got a similar problem - compounded by the small sample size.
I follow public opinion pretty closely, and even pay dues to AAPOR so I can get their journal and read their listserv. And it's something they've been taling a lot about lately, and as you know, remains controversial in the field. There are many many problems with conventional polls - I find it hard to fit my worldview into forced binaries, which serve to reinforce the conventional political spectrum. That's why the idea of "alternative" polls is attractive. But your execution is disappointing.
By the way, one of the AAPOR folks wondered what your policy on callbacks is.
> It's like testing the ferocity of a lion by petting the sheep in
>the next cage. Also, if you've read our article in Z mag or in
>Censored 2000 you will know that Gallup compounds the problem by
>weighting minority votes to account for the even worse non-responder
>problem among ethnic minorities. As we've pointed out there is just
>a fairly good chance that they are magnifying the problem by doing
>that. Our viewpoint is that public opinion polling is a fraud. We
>don't say that ours is less fraudulent, just that we can at least
>counteract the bias inherent in surveying people on exactly what the
>media tells them and what the media wants to hear back from them.
And it looks to me - someone who's broadly very sympathetic to your agenda - that you're doing the same: trying to get people to say what you'd like to hear.
> You can not refute the now multiply repeated findings that we
>first published that only people who believe the old goverment
>media hype on Saddam and 9/11 and Saddam and Al Qaeda and Saddam and
>WMD supported the war and the occupation. Why are we (and PIPA) the
>only ones screaming about that?
This has actually gotten fairly wide coverage, and by orthodox pollsters and media. So you're not breaking any fresh ground here.
> I can tell you why. Because it wouldn't be good for business for
>Gallup and the rest of the crowd to show that they are working for
>and supporting a propaganda machine.
>
>
>On the WTO which I acknowledge as an area of your expertise, we'd
>appreciate any suggestions for a future question or two on the wto /
>GATT/ CAFTA etc. Please contribute.
I'd be happy to. Pew has done some very interesting international polling on "globalization," which finds trade a lot more popular than many activists would assume (though they did their own spin job on a recent press release). Mark Greif wrote up the results of a very interesting focus group in The American Prospect that asked people to explore what "globalization" meant to them - and it turned out to be a real grab-bag. I'd like to see more exploration of these topics; I'll think about how that translates into questions.
>On the question about Bush and impeachment you are both right and
>wrong in my view. We did not ask straight out if people favor
>impeachment.
Why not? That's the political question that matters.
> Nor did we say straight out that Bush lied. What we did do is
>present two facts and then offered people a conclusion (based on the
>facts Bush mislead, regardless of whether he lied or not) and asked
>their opinion as to whether misleadership that leads to war is
>grounds for impeachment. If you think that is improper then I am
>afraid you do not understand how the media cast on all public
>discourse about such policies is biased to assure that people never
>consider such questions. Our "slant" is no more fraudulent than
>theirs
Ah, the "They do it too!" defense. Very popular, but not persuasive.
> or that of polls that mimic the "frame of reference" that the Media
>and government set on such things. It is just different. We choose
>to associate dots a and d where they insist that dot a can only be
>associated with dot b and c. There is no way to undo that a-> b->
>c-> logic (or propganda theme) without postulating an alternative
>logical framework. As far as your concerns that we have "spun" the
>results, I think you are off base. I do not know if 39% of the
>public thinks what Bush did is grounds for impeachment because of
>our small numbers and the non-responder problem. We have tried to
>urge others with money and resources to repeat this with large
>numbers. We were even asked to redo it by Democrats.com but we were
>not able to do it. However, even if only 30% of the public thinks
>Bush has done someting that is grounds for impeachment, to not make
>that into a major news story is outrageous. You should be more
>angry at the censorship.
If there were, as you say, a "a rising tide of public anger that no one is paying attention to" - approaching 40% of the population - then it would not be too surprising to expect some marginal House Democrat to introduce an impeachment resolution, as Barr did with Clinton when it seemed an extreme and weird position.
> For you to argue that 42% who thought it not grounds for
>impeachment means something is to miss the whole point of this
>amazing finding. If 30% or 39% favor impeachment it means that the
>entire media structure of the U.S. has successfully distorted our
>perceptions of public anger around the war and thus pacified the
>opposition. 30% of the public is tens of millions of people and
>that aint the left, it's a potentially organizable force for
>fundamental structural changes in the U.S. If you don't see that I
>wonder what your frame of reference is as to what info is more or
>less important. We've never said that we are more objective than
>the corporate polls or media.
If you're coming from any radical or critical viewpoint, you have to be more rigorous than the mainstream or it will be very easy to discredit you. I'm sad you don't agree. --
Doug Henwood Left Business Observer 38 Greene St - 4th fl. New York NY 10013-2505 USA voice +1-212-219-0010 fax +1-212-219-0098 cell +1-917-865-2813 email <mailto:dhenwood at panix.com> web <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com>