Gee, That Op Ed On Bogus Bush Poll Numbers Looks Familiar!

[displacedtexan]

Yep, it's definitely been astroturfed.

Here's my blog post on the John Adams "Opinion" piece:

Shame on the editors and the publisher of The Salt lake Tribune (and several others) for allowing this total piece of tripe to appear in print. Even on their Opinion Pages:

Reliance on faulty polls pushes Bush popularity ratings downward
By John Adams

WASHINGTON - President Bush shouldn't worry. His poll numbers are nowhere near as low as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other mainstream media would have you believe.
How come? First, the polls are not what they claim to be. They are not really polls of the American people or American voters. If you look at the fine print at the end of these stories, you will see that they were based on telephone interviews with around 1,000 people.
So when they say that "more than half of all Americans" feel the president is not doing a good job, they are really talking about just over 500 people - roughly, the number of Democrats in the sample.
Since Democrats are never likely to agree that Bush or any other Republican is doing a good job, we should focus on the other 500. If 30-plus percent of the total of 1,000 feel that the president is doing a good job that means that more than 60 percent of the 500 non-Democrats feel he is doing a good job.

Stupidity and/or pig ignorance should not excuse this downright attempt to deceive readers.

As for John Adams...

His opinion piece above was also carried by:

Colorado Daily.com ("Don't trust the polls on Bush")

Wilmington Star.com ("Bush needn't worry about polls")

KRTcampus.com ("Reliance on faulty polls pushes Bush popularity ratings downward")
Ahem. "KRT Campus is a national wire service for college newspapers."

I'm sure there are more copies of this ridiculous opinion piece out there. Let me know if you see it.

Oh, and will someone recommend some math classes to the perfectly pig ignorant John Adams? How about this one, a 7th Grade math lesson on percent and sampling?

It's a start, Mr. Adams.

I can't believe we're still fighting this rightwing astroturf crap!

[shoelace414]

1. only people that matter are Republicans.

[displacedtexan]

3. Of course!

This astroturfing crap really has me steamed this morning.

[Rose Siding]

2. Astroturf is, I believe, when letters are copied by different people

and then printed by various papers. In the case of op-ed pieces, many are carried by various news orgs. Molly Ivins, for example, can be found in papers all over the country.

[displacedtexan]

4. What do you call this?

I forget.

[monarch]

7. A more important question might be whether

a newspaper should be allowed to report misrepresented "facts" in the guise of an opinion piece since many people regard an opinion piece as reporting actual facts, and, if not facts, the "opinion" of the newspaper itself.

[displacedtexan]

8. Excellent question!

Surely, it can't be that no one was available to write an op ed.

[depakid]

5. Just goes to show the sorry state of the US media

and the ignorance (or lack of integrity) among their publishers and editors.

As I mentioned on another thread- there are a lot of good reasons to find fault in cheap media polls- and yet this idiot doesn't stumble onto a single one of them. LOL.

[ShortnFiery]

6. Good Catch!

Kudos! :applause:

[underpants]

9. So W's support from Republicans has fallen to 60%

it was in the high 80's and 90's. What happened?

[displacedtexan]

10. They didn't get their piece of Republican pie.

Otherwise, they'd follow him off a cliff.

[Zynx]

11. So if you only poll Republicans and independents....

Republicans give him about a 66% approval rate or sometimes less and independents give him about 21%. Assuming roughly equal weightings I get a 43.5% approval rating among non-Democrats. That's pretty fucking bad. That number should be at least 60% or 70% in a healthy administration.

[Virginian]

12. So THATS where Rove got his polling numbers

he quoted on Monday.

[Sapere aude]

13. I hope this guy never teaches a statistics class. This sounds like

freeper logic.

one freeper meme says that the polls sample Dems more because Repubs work and Dems are on welfare and are home to answer the phone.

If the sample polled was a truly random sample, then within the margin of error, what is true of the sample is true of the population the sample was chosen from.