#Reuters And The Self-Fullfilling Prophecy

Reuters has chosen to try to pull the wool over Americans’ eyes again. This time with a poll showing Obama at 50 percent approval, a major jump in his ratings. Here’s a taste of how Reuters is selling their poll:

For the first time since early July, more Americans approve of the job President Barack Obama is doing than disapprove, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll that shows his approval rating now at 50 percent. [emphasis mine]

Reuters is playing very serious mind games, trying to give an “understood” self-fullfilling prophecy: That Obama is gaining strength and will easily win re-election. But before I explain how Reuters is doing that propaganda game, I want to remind well-informed readers of Reuters’ history. Remember all the articles and parts of articles Reuters had which put the Obama administration in a bad light? Those articles and parts of articles the Obama administration told Reuters to memory-hole? And Reuters obeyed and memory-holed them? Yeah, they’re still out there, written by Reuters, and saved by Conservative bloggers. All you have to do is a bit of research to find them.

So, yeah, Reuters is a Leftist lackey organization pretending to be an unbiased news outfit. Now, on to why Reuters is attempting to game the system, attempting to provide a self-fullfilling prophecy (which is far more difficult to do with all the citizen-journalists on this “Al Gore invention”). And Ed Morrissey explains what Reuters forgot to hide.

At this point, you’d normally see me analyze the sample type, size, and composition for a critical analysis of whether this particular poll is reliably predictive. Oddly, Reuters doesn’t provide a link for its readers to peruse the data set — but that’s no problem, as it turns out, because Reuters provides its own credibility-killing data at the end of its report:

The Reuters/Ipsos telephone poll of 1,084 adults included 554 respondents who identified themselves as Democrats, 421 as Republicans, and 109 as independents. The total respondents included 937 registered voters.

Now, Mr Morrissey notes that it took over 51 percent Democrats in the poll to get Obama’s favorability to 50 percent, which is itself a very bad outcome for Obama. It means that even some Democrats are selling off. But, looking at the numbers, Democrats do not have a 5-4 advantage over Republicans. So there is where the poll is Dishonorable. Further looking at the numbers, Democrats do not have a 5-1 advantage over Independents, a clear majority of whom disapprove of Obama. So there is where the poll is Dishonorable.

There are two reasons why Reuters would be so willing to be so dishonest in their polling: 1) To pump up Liberals, and 2)To get the ignorant voters to “go with the crowd” that Reuters lyingly created out of thin air. Oh, there’s a third reason: Reuters is run by a bunch of fools who don’t know the first thing about creating a scientific poll. And I seriously doubt that third reason is in any way accurate.

UPDATE
After writing this, and looking further at Reuters’ polling data, I found something very obvious that I had missed:

The Reuters/Ipsos telephone poll of 1,084 adults… included 937 registered voters. [emphasis mine]

It was a poll of adults and not a poll of registered voters, nor a poll of likely voters. This means Reuters had already started out with a Left-skewed poll and skewed the already Left-skewed poll even harder Left.

If you do your research, and plot the results on a graph with “actuality” being the center, you will find a properly-proportioned poll of Likely Voters being very near center. You will also find a properly-proportioned poll of Registered Voters will skew to the Left of center, meaning more Liberal than the actual voting results. You will also find a properly-proportioned poll of Adults will skew to the Left of the properly-proportioned poll of Registered Voters, meaning the poll of Adults is the furthest Left poll and least accurate poll of the three. Oft-times by large margins. (Which is why Left-leaning and media polling outfits (but I’m unnecessarily redundant) who seek to show their polling accuracy switch to Likely Voters as the time to actually vote arrives.)

So, not only did Reuters intentionally select the most Left-skewed poll format, Reuters also blatantly ignored national affiliation rates to give Democrats a massive advantage in their mock-worthy poll!