Yesterday, Campaign Desk documented CNN’s lame response to MoveOn’s full-page ad in the New York Times criticizing Gallup’s polling methods. In the ad, MoveOn also attacked CNN and USA Today, which contract with Gallup to do their polling, for “acting as unquestioning promotional partners, rather than as critical journalists.”
Today, for its part, USA Today set out to prove that while still confident in its partnership with Gallup, it is not “unquestioning.”
USA Today‘s media reporter Mark Memmott cleanly sums up the debate “[a]t issue: Whether too many Republicans end up being counted as ‘likely voters’ in Gallup’s polls. In the past six USA Today/CNN/Gallup polls this year, about 40 percent of the likely voters in the surveys said they considered themselves to be Republicans. By one measure, that’s higher than might be expected: Exit polls after the past three presidential elections showed that about 35 percent of voters in those years said they were Republicans.”
This controversy, as Memmott sees it, is not about Republican bias — a charge leveled by MoveOn’s advertisement — but rather an honest difference of opinion between two schools of polling.
Accordingly, Memmott gives Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup poll, an opportunity to defend his poll and his methods. But, unlike CNN, Memmott also turns to John Zogby, CEO of the independent polling firm Zogby International, who adjusts his samples to align with party affiliation data from previous exit polls.
In addition, an informative chart accompanies the story emphasizing the GOP advantage over Democrats in the 21 Gallup election polls conducted since January. Eighty-five percent of the surveys questioned more Republicans than Democrats.
Jim Norman, USA Today’s in-house polling guru, told Memmott, “I’m impressed by the constant testing and retesting they do of their methodology to make sure they get it right.”
(CNN was unavailable for comment for the USA Today story.)
USA Today handled this news story like a news story, using a reporter to sketch out both sides of the debate for its readership. While Newport’s side of the argument receives considerably more space, USA Today‘s readers are not left with the impression that MoveOn is just a crybaby launching an unfounded attack.
Only viewers of CNN labor under that misapprehension.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.