Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center spent the days immediately after the presidential election gloating that the polls showing a Biden blowout were wrong. Jeffrey Lord proclaimed that "the media and the polls blew it. Big time," and Tim Graham devoted an entire column to ranting that pollsters "are damaging the legitimacy of our democracy, not helping it. When they’re this off base, they lead to both sides of the divide feeling the system is rigged. What's obviously rigged are these polls, easily categorized as an alternative reality. It’s hard not to see intentional rigging, not some kind of accidental bias."
So it might be a little surprising to learn that an anonymously written Nov. 9 piece under the headline "FACT: Big Media and Big Tech Stole the 2020 Election" is actually based on ... a poll:
A new post-election poll from the Media Research Center, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, shows 36 percent of Biden voters were NOT aware of the evidence linking Joe Biden to corrupt financial dealings with China through his son Hunter. Thirteen percent of these voters (or 4.6% of Biden’s total vote) say that had they known these facts, they would not have voted for the former Vice President.
Such a shift away from Biden would have meant President Trump would have won the election with 289 electoral votes.
[...]
The net effect: 13.1% of these voters (4.6% of Biden’s overall vote) say they would not have voted for Biden if they had been properly informed. Applying this to the most closely-contested states, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would today all be in the Trump column, giving the President 289 electoral college votes and a second term. (This also assumes Alaska, where the current margins are not close, is also called for the President).
Obviously, the MRC is not going to mention that McLaughlin has long been a notoriously unreliable pollster -- receiving a C/D rating from FiveThirtyEight.com, perhaps best known for a 2014 poll for then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor that showed him up by 34 points two weeks before a Republican primary against opponent Dave Brat; Brat ended up defeating Cantor by 11 points.
But there's one other thing the MRC is not telling you: As we documented when the MRC used the company to advance another right-wing anti-media narrative, McLaughlin & Associates worked for Trump's re-election campaign. That's a blatant -- and undisclosed -- conflict of interest.
Despite bering on record denouncing the entire polling process as shoddy and biased, MRC put out a statement from Brent Bozell proclaiming the results of its own poll as "indisputable fact":
“It is an indisputable fact that the media stole the election. The American electorate was intentionally kept in the dark. During the height of the scandal surrounding Hunter Biden’s foreign dealings, the media and the big tech companies did everything in their power to cover it up. Twitter and Facebook limited sharing of the New York Post’s reports, and the liberal media omitted it from their coverage or dismissed it as Russian disinformation.
“Now we know the impact of that cover-up. 4.6% of Biden voters say they would not have voted for him had they been aware of evidence of this scandal. This story would have potentially changed the outcome of this election. The media and Silicon Valley were fully aware of this, so they actively tried to prevent it from reaching the American public. The American people deserved to know the truth; now it’s too late.”
It cannot be true that all polls are inaccurate except the ones bought and paid for by the MRC. But that's the fiction the MRC is going with.
UPDATE: The promotion of this story at the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, similarly censored the fact that McLaughlin was Trump's pollster and failed to explain why this poll should be trusted when it has attacked the entire polling industry and shoddy and inaccurate.
