Topic: Media Research Center
Late last year, we caught the Media Research Center's Joseph Vazquez promoting right-wing pollster Richard Baris while censoring the fact that Baris had been busted for pushing false claims about fraud in the 202 presidential election. So it's probably not surprising that Vazquez gave Baris another platform in a Feb. 19 post:
Big Data Poll Director Richard Baris slammed a CNBC economic survey arguing that President Joe Biden won an initial approval rating that topped the first ratings of the last four presidents.
CNBC’s recent All-America Economic Survey of 1,000 people claimed that Biden’s leftist agenda won him a whopping 62 percent initial approval rating for his “handling of the economy and for uniting the country.” The result supposedly topped the “first ratings of the last four presidents.” In addition, Biden’s initial rating was “18 points higher than Trump’s.” Baris summed up Biden’s numbers in one sentence: “At this point, there’s no excuse for them to continue to release results derived from methodologies that have repeatedly proven to be flawed.”
When reached for comment, Baris told the MRC the accuracy of polling companies could be measured by the reliability of their predictions leading up to the tumultuous 2020 election:
The only real test of a pollster's accuracy and trustworthiness comes on Election Day. It’s important to remember that these pollsters failed miserably last November. There are several reasons for that failure, all of which are now pretty widely acknowledged in the industry.
Given that Baris has already been busted pushing false informaiton, there's no reason to trust his opinion on anything -- but Vazquez does anyway, letting him rant about polls he doesn't like use methods he doesn't like. But he seems to be overlooking that CNBC's poll can be described as valid because its Biden poll presumably uses methodology similar to its previous polls, making comparisons between those polls more valid. It's much more difficult to draw comparisons between polls if the methodologies they used are drastically different.
Given that BNaris has made his pro-Republican leanings all too clear, it's hard to take his criticism of other polls seriously because it seems obvious he's just trashing the competition. Indeed, FiveThirtyEight thinks that Baris' Big Data Poll findings are so unreliable that it has received an F rating and has been banned from its polling analysis.
This is who Vazquez thinks is a credible "expert" on polling.
