Topic: WorldNetDaily
A Feb. 11 WorldNetDaily column by Brad O'Leary touts "a recent poll conducted by ATI-News and Zogby International" purporting to demonstrate that President Obama's stiumulus plan is unpopular with voters. But the poll questions, as described are clearly skewed to provide a negative impression of the plan to those being polled:
- "Some people say that the nearly one-trillion dollars in debt and subsequent interest incurred by the stimulus bill during an economic downturn will make the recovery hard to achieve. Do you agree or disagree?"
- "Some Republicans say the Obama stimulus package spends too much and stimulates too little. Do you agree or disagree?"
- "Most Republicans oppose the currently proposed stimulus bill supported by President Obama because they say there is too much money being spent for non-stimulus items. Do you agree or disagree that too much money is being spent on items that won't improve the economy?"
Poll respondents only heard the views of Republicans and "some people" about the stimulus, not the other side. That makes the poll biased and, thus, unreliable.
Further, readers don't learn until reading O'Leary's bio tag at the end of the column at O'Leary is president of ATI-News. As we've noted, ATI News is merely an aggregator of other news websites and generates no original content, and O'Leary is author of the WorldNetDaily-published Obama-bashing speculative fantasy "The Audacity of Deceit." So O'Leary clearly has a biased agenda to push, as if the Zogby poll he commissioned wasn't evenough proof of that.
O'Leary further demonstreates his disregard for the truth by also citing "a snap poll of Americans was taken by America Online" in which, "according to the 207,000 Americans who responded, he got an 'F.'" As we've previously detailed, AOL polls are opt-in and susceptible to "freeping" -- the practice of organizing like-minded voters to skew an online poll, as practiced by the right-wing Free Republic -- so its results are even more unreliable than that Zogby poll.
O'Leary's shoddy polling and biased agenda proves nothing. He should leave the polling to real pollsters.
