To Doug Henwood:
First off: Retro Poll reached a random sample of 513 Americans from 48 states between April 19-May 5. Your comments suggest you are ignoring almost all the results and the 5 excellent articles on many subjects that were written by our committee while you remain fixated upon the impeachment question with the same objection you had last time? Ok we get it. You think that question is biased. That doesn't mean we're wrong, just that you have a different opinion. (Your friend's self-labeling remark that it sounds like we interviewed everyone in Berkeley is barely worth commenting on.) There is a great deal of interesting and useful information in our poll results and in the articles we've posted on our site. And assuming you are not being disingenuous about the impeachment question you can see we do the same type of thing on the death penalty and on Haiti. We let people know the facts about what is going on with death row, with many innocent people having been released from death row, before we ask if they support a moratorium until all the procedural problems in application of the death penalty have been reviewed and fixed. 90% of the public doesn't know anything about all that, so we inform them. That's part of our approach to reality. You don't like it, but we do. We changed the impeachment question substantially to accommodate criticism that it did not link impeachment clearly enough to Bush and his specific acts. There is no ambiguity now in what we are asking, though some small percent of people don't believe that Bush "misled" the public and Congress.
I've made our methodological argument on the AAPOR list serve, on our web site and in published articles many times by now. Not only haven't I "learned" (your term) to avoid this approach from my interactions but I have received interest and support from plenty of AAPOR members for my postings, more than you might ever imagine. One academic researcher has asked if he can use one of my arguments in a graduate seminar and on a web site. Another University professor has just responded to our poll telling us he plans to use this work in his statistics courses. Three other faculty members have asked if they can get students involved in our polls. One of these faculty (who teaches critical thinking) did a substantial amount of polling himself on this poll that you are excoriating. We know full well that this is a controversial question the way we ask it, but that does not necessarily invalidate the approach.
If you want to see the real world that Americans are not allowed to see try reading Fidel Castro's speech today in response to Bush's announcement this week that the U.S. will determine the next government of Cuba and for now will further strangulate Cuba economically. Then read what the corporate media implies Castro says. Read it and weep. You want to poll on what the American people think about that? They will think what they are told to think by the media bias because we don't have a free press. Only one viewpoint--anti Cuban government--sits in the center of the page. Yet, it is now open U.S. policy to take over the Cuban government (just like what happened before Iraq). In the case of Cuba we have a nation that has achieved a lower infant mortality rate than the U.S. and has thousands of doctors helping poor nations all over the globe. That is what the U.S. is intent on destroying.
You can act like you've got something new to say about this impeachment question, but that's what's "tendentious" (your pejorative word) not our approach. There is vast anger out there against Bush and there is more support for his impeachment than there ever was against Clinton which is so important because it exposes that our democracy is slip sliding away. The reality is that the overwhelming biases that people absorb from the media condition their answering all polling questions for big time polls, even when there is no intent placed into the polls. Apparently you think Rupert Murdoch (I'm basing this on your naming him in the e-mail you sent me) is doing a much different number in biasing the news with his News Corp. than CBS and CNN and PBS but PIPAs survey last year on how people are misled (their ignorance being proportional to where they get their information with those who get it mainly from TV news being the most ignorant and misled) showed that Fox news is only marginally worse (or better depending on your vantage) at prejudicing people than CBS and CNN and PBS and the others. After naming Fox the worst PIPA (the next day) had to issue a retraction and clarify that the differences were not substantial. We all know Murdoch is pro-fascist but it seems that you don't realize what the overall corporate media slant amounts to in terms of sound bites and major stories and how they influence public opinion--not much different.
Like the death squads all over the world most of the rightists on radio and TV are creations of big money marketing not of a grass roots demand for fascist ideology. People like Rush, Savage and Hannity were created by money not by the yahoos and ditto heads while anti-globalization and anti-capitalist movements are never given a voice and are peripheralized and attacked. Left as an idea is precluded, and so the public gets to see only about half of the spectrum of views while they are fooled into thinking that the left viewpoint is what the corporate media or PBS/ NPR presents.
I'm amazed that someone who calls his institution the "Left" Business Observer doesn't understand that. The corporate press and its disgusting role has been totally dissected by everyone from McChesney to Chomsky to Studs Terkel to Ben Bagdikian to Larry Bensky to Danny Schecter to Justin Lewis, to Sut Jhally, to Sidney Shanberg, to Monbiot to Pilger to Michael Moore etc etc...to half the rest of the world outside the U.S. The corporate media works diligently with AP and the State and Defense Departments to bias the pubic view, not by conspiracy but because their managers (and sometimes reporters) live in that strange territory--the nether world-- that lacks depth perception, that covets the easy news story and the relationship with seats of power, that believes in the rhetoric of government and is afraid to be put out of the insiders club.
Only fools are interested in measuring public opinion that merely mirrors back the biases in our unfree press. How can we pretend that is meaningful opinion? But fools can achieve much worse than tom foolery; they manage processes whose main objective function in this culture is to validate anti-democratic policies by asking questions which do not allow people to think about what they really think about things and instead simply mirror back the preponderance of misinformation and disinformation that are highlighted by the sound bite media culture. One of the areas we tried to poll on previously was Palestine and Israel. We found such profound misinformation about the occupation and subjugation of the Palestinians that we can not even apply our methodology to that situation. Maybe you'll think that all it means is that the public is pro-Israeli. But that isn't what we find. All we find, by and large, is ignorance and confusion and sympathy for "both peoples" and no opinions.
At Retro Poll, we do not doubt for a minute that if asked a simple question on impeachment by someone who is perceived of as representing an institution that is tied to the basic assumptions of this country's world domineering status, with no factual antecedents, the proportions might come up different from the 39% in our findings. So what? If that were to be the case would it mean that this latter approach is a more accurate view of public opinion than the one we use? We don't think so. That is not democracy; it's status quoism.
Doug, we have many questions that expose this terrible state of affairs both in opinion and knowledge on our polls and you think you can just ignore them, just like the media ignores (or downplays) the half of the realities of the world that don't add up to supporting U.S. domination under the fraudulent rubric they call democracy (where we get to torture whomever we want from Columbia to Guantanamo to Iraq and have military bases in 140 countries to enforce U.S. hegemony). Retro Poll will not allow the media bias that has led 39% of the public to still believe that Saddam Hussein worked with Al Qaeda to interfere with asking people real questions about real conditions. If you or anyone else doesn't think that Bush misled the public about WMD, Al Qaeda and 9/11 we'll have to let history deal with your complicity with that ruse. Knowing your background I am incredulous that you would kiss ass to the assumptions of the market to that degree. You're no fool and so you should be able to see the relevance and value in what we are saying and doing.
Marc Sapir MD, MPH Executive Director Retro Poll www.retropoll.org