Topic: CNSNews.com
Craig Bannister was in full pro-Trump stenography mode in a Sept. 10 CNSNews.com blog post:
Americans are being misled by “phony polling information” produced and reported by hostile news media, President Donald Trump said Tuesday.
In the first of two tweets on the subject, Trump recalled how results of a “fake poll” by ABC/Washington Post during his 2016 campaign were drastically revised after his lawyers protested:
[...]
The ABC/Washington Post poll results referenced by Trump appear to be from its 2016 election tracking poll published on October 23rd of that year, which reported that “Clinton leads Trump by 12 percentage points among likely voters, 50 to 38 percent.” On November 1, 2016, The Washington Post reported the tracking poll showed that “Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are all but tied.”
But as Bannister's Media Research Center colleague Nicholas Fondacaro should have learned by now, just because you don't like the numbers doesn't mean that they're false.And Bannister also omits the context of Trump's remarks in order to portray them as unquestioned fact.
Vox reports that Trump's attack was promoted by a new ABC/Washington Post poll showing dismal numbers for him. Vox also explained why the 2016 poll showing him 12 points behind Clinton wasn't "fake" or "phony" at all:
The final Post-ABC tracking poll before the November 2016 election found that Hillary Clinton had the support of 47 percent of likely voters, compared to 43 percent for Trump. That’s not far off from Clinton’s ultimate margin of victory in the popular vote, which was 48 percent to 46 percent. In fact, Clinton’s edge in that final poll did “not reach statistical significance, given the poll’s 2.5 percentage-point margin in sampling error around each candidate’s support,” as the Post noted in its writeup at the time. And one factor working in Trump’s favor that the Post also noted was that he was ahead in a number of battleground states.
The Post didn’t respond to a request for comment about Trump’s accusation that they manipulated their 2016 polls after Trump’s “lawyers protested,” but a graph of their polling shows, predictably, that Clinton’s lead widened after the Access Hollywood tape was released in early October 2016, only to steadily narrow as the WikiLeaks dumps and FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress about the investigation of her emails rocked her campaign.
It was difficult to foresee that Trump would lose the popular vote while winning the Electoral College. But the fact remains that although the Post-ABC polling underrepresented Trump’s support by about 3 percentage points, it pegged Clinton’s support within a point, and correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote. The poll that Trump now bashes as “inaccurate” certainly left open the possibility that he might ultimately prevail.
In short, Trump is trying to rewrite history.
And Bannister is all too eager to help Trump rewrite it instead of following the journalistic duty to tell the full truth.
