Topic: WorldNetDaily
An April 25 WorldNetDaily article regurgitates the results of a "poll" by the right-wing American Policy Center claiming to find that "overwhelming majorities opposing the concept, plans and ideas" of the U.S.-Canada-Mexico Security and Propserity Partnership/North American Union. But it wasn't a real poll at all, despite WND's efforts to portray it otherwise as it cribbed from the APC's press release about it:
The poll of one million American households revealed that 58 percent of the households contacted had not heard of the SPP.
"It is important to note that APC did not select households that might represent specific ideological positions," the group said. "The chosen households represented neither conservative nor liberal positions. Instead the recipients were a wide [variety] of Americans who live in the direct path of the proposed Trans Texas/NAFTA Corridor, from Texas to Minnesota."
Normal polls don't contact "one million American households." What this tells us -- though WND and APC don't explicitly bother to do so -- that this poll was merely a mass mailing in which people had to respond to be counted -- that is, an opt-in poll, which are notoriously unreliable.
The APC press release sheds a little more light on how the "poll" was conducted:
The survey, titled “Do Americans Support a North American Union” asked a series of questions concerning the SPP and the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC). The survey package also included a four-page report prepared by APC entitled “NAU Fact Sheet,” providing details about the SPP, the TTC and how these programs are being implemented quietly, behind closed-door meetings like the one just completed in New Orleans.
So the only information these respondents had at hand regarding the SPP/NAU was information supplied by the APC itself -- which opposes the NAU. (APC chief Tom DeWeese belongs to the Coalition to Block the North American Union.) Nowhere that we could find does APC make public the materials it sent to those "one million American households," nor does it state what percentage of those households responded to the survey.
Which makes the survey's key claim -- that 58 percent of those who chose to respond to the survey had not heard of the NAU prior to APC's mass mailing, but 90-plus percent oppose its provisions -- even more bogus than the rest of the survey. The only thing that 58 percent had to make judgments on the issue was APC's "fact sheet" attacking it -- which, by the way, concludes:
The SPP is an invastion of our culture and our economy. It's about the redistribution of American wealth and industry. It will represent the end of over 250 years of an historic experiment -- unless Americans across the nation say no -- now.
Given that, is it really surprising that 90-plus percent of respondents oppose the NAU? After all, angered people are the ones likely to be motivated enough to mail back the APC's survey.
Nowhere does WND mention that APC opposes the NAU; rather, it benignly portrays APC as "a grassroots activist group in Washington that asked a series of questions about the SPP, the Trans Texas Corridor transportation project and other issues."
