So Reuters has a poll by Reuters that finds extremism is voters' greatest worry. I don't believe it. Granted, by now everyone should take polls with at least a block of salt. But in the polls I've been following out of morbid curiosity, I've not seen extremism anywhere near the top. In not a few polls it hasn't been mentioned at all. The economy, the wars, the crime rates and the border crisis all top the majority of polls I've seen, with concerns about healthcare always being a contender.
Nope. This strikes me of one of those 'how to stuff a survey' polls. You know, like asking 'Do you support legalizing child rape or do you think extremism is the country's greatest concern?'.
Again, polls by now should be seen as reliable as the media that reports them. Nonetheless, when I see something like this that is hell and gone from what I've seen almost anywhere else, you just know something is up. The only thing I can think of is that the sampling of Americans in the poll were all from the Reuters press office.
Convincing people of the threat of danger that does not exist is the first step to manipulating them. As I said before there is nothing that comes from the media that I believe no matter how plausible it may sound.
ReplyDeleteAs Mark Twain said: "Those who don't read the newspapers are uninformed. Those who do read them are misinformed." ---- G. Poulin
DeleteTrue. Taking the media with a grain of salt was always considered wisdom. Today, I almost assume if the media isn't talking about it then it must be true. Which is a pretty tough indictment if you think on it.
DeleteI believe Mark Shea exists.
ReplyDeleteI believe Mark Shea is a danger.
So there is that.....
I think if we take the Gospel seriously he's a danger. A person could be forgiven from thinking it's OK to reject Christ and live anyway you want, as long as you earn your salvation through doing good deeds and help destroy Mark's political opponents. The same goes for those who keep giving Mark kudos for what he does. Again, if we take the Gospel seriously.
DeleteThere is definitely some dishonesty in the poll. It's impossible to tell HOW dishonest it is, because we don't have the full text of all the questions (I suspect that they used some priming techniques.)
ReplyDeleteHowever, we know that Reuters is trying to mislead its audience just by the article. The headline says that "extremism" is the biggest threat. But the category listed in the article itself is "extremism or threats to democracy." It's pretty certain that the "threats to democracy" part of that category is doing more work than the "extremism" part.
They also frame "extremism" as a topic that will do damage to Donald Trump, yet they also list their own poll as saying that people were in basically a dead heat when it came to Biden and Trump on this issue (34% favoring Biden, 31% favoring Trump.)
I am also suspicious about the fact that they didn't give percentages for Independent voter opinions, saying only that "about a third" were worried about "extremism" and "about one in five" were worried about "immigration." They want us to think that this means 33% and 20%, but the percentages could be something like 28% and 23% and the phrases would still technically be accurate.
If we had all the questions and all the data there would be other shenanigans, no doubt.