Pravda Polls - Predictable and FalseListen, Political Class—the people are not fooled… Of the Sotomayor nomination and related Pravda coverage, we predicted: …Pravda will create a favorable though irrelevant poll for Sotomayor. A sample question might be: don’t you think someone with Sotomayor’s personal story deserves a respectful hearing? And the answers to that question will be manipulated into a report that 79% of the people believe she should be confirmed. Beltway Republicans will then roll over on command, American ideals be damned.
At this writing, Sotomayor has been taken off the Pravda front pages (because her obviously racist attitudes are not playing well with Americans, and Pravda would like to keep a lid on coverage as much as possible until closer to her confirmation hearing in July), and the predicted poll has not yet surfaced. But the same Pravda modus operandi is in evidence in this weekend’s release of a New York Times poll that suggests that 72% of Americans support a strong move toward government-run healthcare.
First, the New York Times is effectively an arm of the Obama government. Second, the Times, like all left-wing organizations, wants socialized medicine. Third, it’s becoming clear based on actual activity in Washington that the Political Class is hearing loud and clear that Americans in fact do NOT want government-run healthcare and its incomprehensibly high cost and inevitable inefficiency. This entire Obama initiative is on the ropes on the same basis that his other radical left-wing initiatives are on the ropes: the people did not see any of this coming based on the election of 2008; they would have rejected it then had it been honestly disclosed, and they reject it now. So what is to be done? A Pravda Poll of course.
We’d like to go on record as predicting that sooner or later (maybe less than five years) litigation is going to reveal that one or more Pravda polls are complete fabrications—as in no one was really called or surveyed, and some subset of Pravda staff designed poll questions and supplied poll answers to yield percentages that advance the Pravda-approved position. Most people don’t want to believe integrity is that far down the rat hole that is today’s media, but we stand by this prediction. Right now the focus of polling criticism is on oversampling of Democrats vs. Republicans—a fact which clearly occurred in previous ‘approval rating’ polls, and was repeated in the recent healthcare poll. Other criticism is based on the wording of polling questions themselves, which end up directing the poll respondent to the ‘right’ answer. Still other criticism relates to poll sample sizes (the NYT healthcare poll was based on 895 respondents!!!!) and geographic and socioeconomic diversity among respondents.
Whatever.
Those Americans who were around during the days of the Soviet Union remember the Pravda media arm of the communist government. Pravda would report on the latest Soviet five year plan, heralding the incredible achievements of the Soviet system, overcoming bad weather, crop disease, etc., to turn out amazing production. Meanwhile the people of the Soviet Union waited in lines for basic food supplies. They knew their news media was controlled by the government; they knew from their own lives and experience that everything that was reported was a lie; they probably read it, if at all, for soccer scores or some such. Were it not controlled and supported by the government, it would fail for lack of subscribers.
The New York Times is the Pravda of America in 2009. It is the most relentlessly biased, agenda-driven left-wing news operation in the country, and it is steadily losing subscribers for the same reason the Soviet Pravda would lose them—people have long ago recognized the bias, and have discounted the value of all of its reporting as a result. Sadly, the three dinosaur television networks still take their marching orders as to what is ‘news’ from the NYT (and are steadily losing their audiences), and the Beltway elite still believes the overall package is something to pay attention to and respect. The American people are, as usual, way out in front of the elite, and on an accelerating pace are waking up the Political Class to understand the utter contempt with which Americans view our biased, dishonest and irresponsible media.
So will Pravda Polls continue to drive Obama’s agenda through? We doubt it. The elite of the New York/DC axis live in a bubble that tells them the playbook—left-wing initiative in trouble, cook up a Pravda poll, lead the news with it to sway opinion, and deliver the votes in Congress—will always deliver. We’ll see it again on cap-and-trade, immigration amnesty and the Sotomayor nomination. But we think the playbook is worn out and irrelevant. The people and the Political Class can and do go around Pravda.
We believe Pravda Polls are a little like the state-run Iranian media announcing the landslide win and popular standing of Ahmadinejad. How’s that working out? Paul Gable Posted June 21, 2009 |