Wily Fox 9 warps results of AP Yahoo poll on voters’ racist views
Monday, September 22, 2008 at 12:08 pm
- 1 Comment
Fox 9 News anchor Marni Hughes asked the question Sunday night: What role will race play in the November election? The answer she provided came from the latest AP Yahoo poll released over the weekend. As she told the tale (reinforced by text on screen), one-third of white Democrats reported harboring some negative attitudes toward African-Americans. That rose to 40 percent, she said, when white Republican and independent voters were added to the mix.
Judging from that presentation, a viewer with 7th-grade math skills could deduce that almost half of the white Republican and independent voters must hold those racist beliefs, since adding them to the pool of white Democrats raised the percentage from 33 to 40 percent.
And that means Fox 9 could instead have presented the same facts this way: Almost half of the country’s white Republican and independent voters hold racist views of black people, but when you add in survey results from white Democratic voters, that percentage drops to 40 percent.
It’s as if Fox 9 set out to prove the point former Minnesota Poll director Rob Daves made in recent comments to the Minnesota Independent: that perceived problems with polls often reside in the reporting, not the polls. News outlets need to hew to what polls really say, and news consumers need to drill, baby, drill down into the actual poll results and methodologies.
In this case, Fox 9 sliced and diced the results in a way that emphasized Democrats’ racist attitudes over Republicans and independent voters’ apparently more widely held attachments to the same views. Yet the pollsters should shoulder some blame as well.
UPDATE: By email, producer Ryan Rablin cited this line in the AP story as the source for Fox 9′s report: “But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents.” The AP story goes on: “More than a third of all white Democrats and independents – voters Obama can’t win the White House without – agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks ….” This seems to be a game of Telephone, with statistics shifting as the story passes from one outlet to the next.
The survey used an innovative method, contacting respondents first by phone but then asking questions online — where people are more like to open up and give honest responses, the theory goes. And open up they did, with significant numbers signing onto at one, two or more in a string of stereotypes the pollsters offered.
Yet the pollsters’ own presentation seems to fall short of the mark. The AP’s glib conclusion that non-Democrat racism against Sen. Barack Obama isn’t an issue (“Most Republicans wouldn’t vote for any Democrat for president — white, black or brown”) recalls the logic that rich and poor alike are banned from sleeping under bridges.
Setting aside whether AP Yahoo pollsters asked the right questions of the right people, they aren’t providing the right results to anybody. Nowhere does it appear that either outfit saw fit to break down the racist responses by party affiliation. AP’s report doesn’t have a multi-party breakdown, and neither does Yahoo’s “interactive” Web feature (where interactivity amounts to clicking through more graphs, none of which illuminate the racism-by-party-affiliation point). At Yahoo’s news report the racist views of voters by all three political party groupings appear only in a sidebar graph, without hard numbers. Most egregiously of all, the answers don’t show up in the 20-page PDF of poll results where inquisitive minds should be able to find the facts behind the graphs.
I’ve emailed Fox 9 to ask about how they put together their report, and I’ll update this post with any response.
Oddly, at both the Fox 9 Web site (see above) and Politico Web site (see below), the AP’s story about their survey of voters’ racist stereotypes ran with a photo of Sen. Barack Obama and ads for teeth-whitening products — even though “white teeth” and “brilliant smile” weren’t among the attributes of black people the pollsters offered.
1 Comment
Comment posted September 23, 2008 @ 12:35 am
I don’t think it particularly matters “who is more racist”. The point is, a third of democrats hold “deeply-seated misgivings” towards their own candidate. No matter which way you slice it, that’s bad news for the Obama camp. There’s just no way to spin that in his favor, no matter how hard you try. Republicans have a built-in excuse why not to vote for Obama… they are republicans and Obama is a democrat… simple. However, what’s the dems excuse? They “don’t trust him”?… even though they completely share his ideology and agree with all of his policies? That doesn’t pass the smell test.
If significant numbers of white democrats really do cross party lines, you better believe they will be pegged as racists and largely blamed for Obama’s downfall… especially considering the circumstances. The political climate overwhelmingly favors the democrats (unless you believe the whole “conservative America” thing) and they cannot possibly justify support of the republican party. We are not coming out of the Carter-era, quite the opposite actually. Obama should be embraced as a Reagan-like figure by the entire country but has somehow fallen short. It’s not as if he’s a bad communicator or isn’t personable and charismatic. There is something hidden under the surface that everyone has been dancing around… that is, until the results of this poll were released. Tribalism cuts both ways… just as many blacks will vote for Obama because he’d be the first black president, many whites will vote for McCain because they perceive it as a racial struggle for power. They will side with their race over their party in a vain attempt to preserve Anglo-Saxon power.
Obama has yet to open up a substantial lead in the polls even though he should’ve long ago. If he were white, one would assume that more whites would “trust him”. If Barack Obama was Barry O’Brien, a white populist from Missouri, he’d be running away with this thing… simply because one-third of white democrats wouldn’t harbor “deeply-seated misgivings” towards him. Forget about flaky younger voters, forget about the large African-American turnout… middle-aged whites vastly outnumber both of them and will render both demographics irrelevant if there is any significant break towards McCain.
You better believe that if racism does manifest itself on election day and a significant number of white democrats break for McCain, the media and the republican spin doctors will begin an all-out blitz on the African-American community with buzzwords like “Lincoln’s party” and the “democratic confederacy”, etc.. in an effort to lure them over to the other side. They’ll play off anger, fear and resentment like they always do and will try to turn it into a positive for themselves. Expect them to take low blows and point out that the Ku Klux Klan was founded by democrats or that segregation was largely instituted by the party as well. However, they will fail to mention that the party’s flip-flopped social platforms decades ago. Most Southern democrats left the party after FDR’s “New Deal” and the rise of Eisenhower and the rest of the holdouts were snatched up by Reagan during the Conservative Revolution of the early ’80′s. It’s true, the republican party was once the party of social liberalism but that was long, long ago. Every single meaningful piece of Civil Rights legislation in the modern era was signed into law by democrats. So if racism rears it’s ugly head on election day (which I have a bad feeling that it will… I am a pessimistic realist) and republicans start banging the “republican abolitionist vs. democratic slave-trader” drum (which they undoubtedly will), you’ll know that’s more of a reflection of their own party than anything else. The party of Bush is not the party of Lincoln… sorry. Notice the old confederacy is solidly red? Republicans will try to expose the democratic party’s historical skeletons but will fail to realize that those skeletons now reside in their closet.
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