Disputes over polling techniques, once the exclusive province of statistic geeks and partisan bloggers, heated up and spilled over to the public domain today.
The well-financed liberal advocacy group, MoveOn.org, inserted the issue into the campaign by taking out a full-page ad in The New York Times which accuses Gallup of “refusing to fix a longstanding problem with their [sic] likely voter methodology,” and criticized two media outlets, CNN and USA Today, each of which pays Gallup for the polls and the right to release the results.
MoveOn’s ad argues: “Gallup’s methodology has predicted lately that Republican turnout on Election Day is likely to exceed Democrats’ by six to eight percentage points. But exit polls show otherwise: in each of the last two Presidential elections, Democratic turnout exceeded Republican by four to five points. That discrepancy alone can account for nearly all of Bush’s phantom 14-point lead,” reported by Gallup a couple of weeks ago.
Often, CNN covers contentious issues like this with sound bites from both sides, treating both positions roughly equally. But not this time. After all, a blow to Gallup’s reputation as a reliable polling service is also a blow to CNN. So, on the network’s “Inside Politics” this afternoon, it dealt with the issue this way:
Anchor Judy Woodruff began by briefly outlining MoveOn’s complaint: “[R]ecent polls have shown George W. Bush leading John Kerry and MoveOn.org claims Gallup’s polling techniques exaggerate Republican support.” Woodruff then gave Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport almost three minutes to respond, uninterrupted, to the charges. Naturally, Newport defended Gallup’s methodology, but essentially asked viewers to take it on faith that he knows what he’s doing.
End of segment.
With that nifty sign-off, CNN implicitly confirmed a criticism of itself that was leveled in the MoveOn ad: the charge that CNN winds up “acting as unquestioning promotional partners [with Gallup], rather than as critical journalists.” For this was not the journalism of a disinterested party with no ax to grind. This was PR. Had it been journalism, it would have gone something like this:
1 – CNN takes note of the MoveOn.org advertisement and the argument that it contains.
2 – A Gallup official responds with the organization’s defense.
3 – A third party — perhaps another establishment pollster — explains that there is more than one school of thought on the issue of weighting polls.
4 – A reporter steps in to remind viewers that Gallup took some similar heat in the year 2000 when its poll results swung erratically from day to day, sometimes by as much as 10 points.
5 – A CNN decision-maker is interviewed and asked if the network is comfortable with Gallup’s work and if it will continue to rely upon it — or not.
End of segment.
But don’t look to see that script unfold on CNN anytime soon.
Meantime, Campaign Desk is told, USA Today, the other co-sponsor of the Gallup poll, is working on its own story on the issue. We’ll be curious to see it.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.